LONDON-LUND CORPUS, THE

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LONDON-LUND CORPUS, THE. A computerized CORPUS of texts in English associated with U. College London (UCL) and the U. of Lund in Sweden. In 1975, the Survey of Spoken English was established at Lund by Jan Svartvik with the aim of transferring to machine-readable form the section of texts derived from recorded speech by the SURVEY OF ENGLISH USAGE at UCL. This version of the SEU spoken texts reduces the amount of detailed information in the SEU transcriptions of the texts by omitting some of the original prosodic features and all paralinguistic features. The 87 spoken texts (all that had by then been processed at the SEU) became available in machine-readable form for distribution in the early 1980s. A selection of 34 texts of face-to-face conversations, totalling some 170,000 words, has been published in A Corpus of English Conversation, edited by Jan Svartvik and Randolph Quirk (Lund: Gleerup, 1980). The Lund Survey of Spoken English has since been engaged in developing a semi-automatic, interactive system of grammatical tagging that can be used primarily for research into the inter-relationship of grammar and prosody.

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