Best Practices for Speech Corpora in Linguistic Research Workshop ...

in various research and/or student projects since the
1980s, mostly without any funds. In particular, an earlier
corpus of approximately 250.000 words (cf. Pavlidou,
2002) has been incorporated into the current one. It is
furthermore important to stress that the Corpus of Spoken
Greek has not been intended as a “closed” database, but
as a dynamic corpus in that it gets enriched with new
recordings and transcriptions, while older transcriptions
are re-examined and eventually improved.
3. Features
As has already been indicated, the Corpus of Spoken
Greek is mainly intended for qualitative analyses of the
Greek language and, more specifically, for the study of
Greek talk-in-interaction from a CA perspective.
Accordingly, in the compilation of the Corpus, particular
emphasis has been placed on data from everyday
conversations in face-to-face interactions or over the
telephone. In addition though to informal conversations
among friends and relatives, the Corpus also includes
other discourse types, which are more institutional, like
recordings of teacher-student interaction in high school
classes, television news bulletins, and television panel
discussions (cf. Table 2 for the size of data from each
discourse type). In sections 3.1 to 3.3 further information
with regard to the collection of data, transcription, files
and metadata is provided.
3.1 Data Collection
The Corpus of Spoken Greek, as mentioned, utilized
earlier data collections and transcriptions (cf. Section 2).
In all cases, however, we have to do with naturalistic data
that were collected for the most part by MA or PhD
students for their theses or by undergraduate students for
their semester work. The informal conversations were
tape- or video-recorded by one of the participants. In the
case of classroom interaction, it was the teacher
her-/himself who made recordings of his/her classes at
high school. The equipment used for the recordings has
been varying over time, as in the beginning only simple
tape- or video-recorders were available, while later on
digital recorders could be employed.
Recordings of private conversations and classroom
interactions were made openly and after having informed
the participants that they would be recorded and getting
their consent. In the case of telephone conversations,
sometimes this information was given after the telephone
calls were conducted. In all cases, the persons who made
the recordings were asked to erase anything they wanted
and to hand in only those conversations/interactions they
would not mind being heard or seen by others. The issue
of participants’ consent, though, has been handled with
much more rigor and detail in the last 15 years, as there is
both a growing sensitivity in the Greek society and an
official Data Protection Authority for the safeguarding of
personal data in Greece. We have therefore been using a
written consent form that is signed by all participants in
those interactions which are not transmitted publicly.
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3.2 Transcription
As is well known, CA lays great emphasis on the detailed
representation of spoken discourse via the transcription of
the recordings. For CA, transcription is not an automatic,
mechanical procedure, of the kind, for example,
accomplished by various software packages, nor is it
confined to the representation of content, as is usually
done in the written form of interviews by journalists (cf.
also Ochs, 1979). On the contrary, the ‘translation’ of
sound into written text requires theoretical elaboration
and analysis, presupposes training, and demands multiple
examination/corrections by several people.
The recordings collected for the Corpus of Spoken Greek
are therefore meticulously transcribed according to the
principles of CA (cf. e.g. Jefferson, 2004; Sacks,
Schegloff and Jefferson, 1974; Schegloff, 2007) in several
rounds by different people. This is basically an
orthographic transcription, in which the marking of
overlaps, repairs, pauses, intonational features, etc., is
carried out in a relatively detailed manner. To this we add
the marking of certain sandhi phenomena and dialectal
features. For the disambiguation of prosodic features (e.g.
sudden voice uprise), we employ the Praat software.
Finally, transcriptions are produced as Word documents,
using a table format that allows different columns for
marking the participants’ names, the numbers of lines
(when necessary), etc. An extract of such a transcription
is illustrated in Table 1 (to which the English translation
has been added): 2
Dimos […] ������ ��� ��:- � �� �� � �� � ��
[…] ��������������������������������������������������
� � �, (1.3) � �� �� � � � � �
����������������������������������������������������
[ . ( ’ .)]
������������������������������������������������
Afrod. [ � � , � � � �[ �] (� � � � )]=
������������������������������������������������������
Yorgos [((����..........................]=
((���������………..….
Afrod. =[ � �? � � � � � � .]
((������� ))
���������������������������������������������������������
Yorgos =[................................................................))]
................................................................))
((������������������))
2 ‘Afrod.’ stands for Afroditi, the name of a female participant.
For the symbols used in the transcription please cf. the
Appendix in Section 8.