The London-Lund Corpus 2 of spoken British English (LLC 2)

More than 50 years ago the remarkable launch of a machine-readable database consisting of half a million words, the London-Lund Corpus (LLC-1) of spoken British English, was a fact. The main goal of this project is to compile a new spoken language corpus, entitled the London-Lund Corpus 2 (LLC-2) of spoken British English, in accordance to the principles of LLC-1 in order to make research on contemporary speech possible and to facilitate principled investigations of recent changes in contemporary spoken English. The two corpora contain the same text categories and to the same extent, namely face-to-face conversation, phone conversation, broadcast discussions and interviews, parliamentary language, spontaneous commentary, legal language and prepared speech.

The compilation of LLC-2 consists of four stages: data collection, transcription, annotation and the launch. Like LLC-1, the data in LLC-2 were primarily recorded at the University College London, and the main emphasis was on spontaneous face-to-face conversations between educated adults. After the data collection, the recordings were transcribed and annotated. The transcription files and the corresponding sound files will be available for download from the Lund University Humanities Lab’s corpus server in 2019. The transcriptions will be in XML format and time-aligned with the sound files. The corpus will come fully equipped with metadata about the texts and the speakers, and a corpus manual.

The compilation of LLC-2 has primarily been funded by two generous grants from The Linnaeus Centre: Thinking in Time: Cognition, Communication, and Learning, financed by the Swedish Research Council, Grant No. 349-2007-8695, and The Erik Philip-Sörensen Foundation as well as by the Åke Wiberg Foundation and Stiftelsen Olof Sagers stipendiefond.

The celebration of the launch of LLC-2 will take place at the Centre for Languages and Literature on Friday 20 September 2019 in the form of a symposium Spoken language across time: Celebrating the launch of the London-Lund Corpus 2. The symposium will be arranged with support of The Birgit Rausing Language Programme and The Royal Society of Letter (Kungliga Humanistiska Vetenskapssamfundet i Lund). Full programme TBA.



July 2018
Congratulations Nele Põldvere!
In stiff competition with over 50 nominees, she was the runner-up for the De Gruyter Best Junior Award at the ISLE (International Society for the Linguistics of English) in London in July 2018 with a paper on What cause you were knackered? The reactive what-x construction in two corpora of Present-Day spoken English.