Corpora tips
Spoken language and the BNC
by Mairi MacDonald

Next in a series of articles looking at ways in which teachers and students can explore words using free corpus resources on the Web.

Introduction

In the last issue of MED Magazine, I looked at how the free Simple Search facility offered by the British National Corpus (BNC) website allows you to extract detailed grammatical information. This month's article shows you how to extract spoken material from the BNC and gives some suggestions for exploiting this in the classroom.

10% of the BNC is made up of spoken material. This includes informal conversations which have been recorded and transcribed as well as formal meetings and radio shows. These provide a rich, authentic source of natural and non-standard English. Looking at written examples of speech is an alternative way of raising awareness of spoken English that would otherwise involve listening to tricky recordings.

Extracting spoken language

Unlike grammatical information, pulling out the spoken examples doesn't involve codes. One way is to type <pause> into the search box. This will find 50 examples of spoken English.

If you want more examples, do the <pause> search again and this should produce a different set of results. Remember to copy and paste any text you want to use – each search generates a random selection of examples so it might be difficult to find it again!

Register

Spoken examples in the BNC are taken from a variety of contexts and present a good way of looking at register.

Copy and paste a selection of spoken extracts and get students to discuss the following points:

•	What clues tell us that this is spoken English rather than written?
•	What do you think the context of the extract is? Is it a formal meeting or a chat between friends? Where do you think the conversation is taking place? For example, are they at home or at work?
•	How well do you think the speakers know each other?

Students should spot repetition and hesitation and words like gonna, cos and ain't. For background information on each conversation, click on the link at the start of each extract.

Finding specific examples of spoken English

Typing /<stext> after a word or phrase is another way of accessing the spoken examples in the BNC. For example, the search like /<stext> will display 50 random spoken examples of like. Here are just a few:

okay and then erm it's, it's like like some lecturers give you like a set of notes

He says yeah but then you come down home and like, they have to go visiting everybody.

So I can get loads of homework done and erm like I can count that as one of my nights in.

Yeah that's okay like when summer time comes and you don't want a fire

I don't, I keep on forgetting about it and like I'm just talking normal like.

Investigating spoken meaning: right!

1 Run a search using right /<stext> to generate spoken examples of right and copy and paste a selection of extracts into a Word document. It's not a bad idea to number the extracts and highlight the language you wish to focus on. Here are a few examples:

1	hmm right, yeah but all these equipments would have been selected by by competition would they?
2	Mm mm. Right, are you gonna get ready and go?
3	that er when you breathe it down right, it goes in your lungs, it doesn't shift.
4	Right mummy's going downstairs now.
5	Right, I'll see you at the weekend.
6	Right so, now you understand how the memory works, and you obviously realize not to leave big gaps between one thing and something below.
7	Cor right, there was one little boy I felt sorry for him right, he went up, down, up, down, weee!

2 As an introduction, ask students what the word right means, and elicit a variety of meanings. Explain that you are going to look at spoken uses.

3 Show students these example sentences from the Macmillan English Dictionary (MED) for right used as an interjection. They can discuss them in pairs and try to detect differences in meaning.

'Get some more milk when you're out.' 'Right.'
I was coming home, right, about 12 o'clock, and I saw him running off.
Right! Is everybody ready to start?
Right, let's try another approach.
You told everyone about tomorrow's meeting, right?

The following meaning menu from MED will help. Students can match an example to a definition heading.

4 Once students have an overview of the spoken meanings of right, they can look at the extracts from the BNC and try to match the examples with the headings listed above.

Sentence fillers

1 Examples of sentence fillers and hesitation devices such as um or er can be found simply by typing um or er into the search box. Spoken sentences often contain more than one sentence filler, so searching on a single utterance such as um can give you a good range of examples:

Erm you may have to um, thinking about the capabilities of that computer there, you may have to um er split it up into er into say two sets of questions.

2 Copy and paste a selection of extracts into a Word document.

1	I seem to remember, i i i you know, you try to bri you brought something back into me mind through saying that but er I, I can't, I couldn't tell you nothing about it no no I couldn't tell you nothing about it.
2	OK then, O K then John, er, looking at your erm, at your fact file, we see here that we've actually got erm, twice the amount of your salary erm, for life cover, which your company which your company actually offers, offers you.
3	Birthday, Queen's Speech on Christmas Day, and er, it usually is the morning, isn't it, in the morning of the, er, Prin the Duke of Edinburgh's birthday, the Queen's birthday.
4	Er for two persons, two people, that manse was adequate I would say.
5	And that wouldn't be the case er with er with some of the er with with the option that's being put forward.

3 Students should discuss what they notice about the extract and annotate the worksheet. What clues tell us that this has been transcribed rather than written by someone? As well as hesitation devices, students should notice:

•	repetition
•	very short or very long sentences
•	ungrammatical sentences
•	ellipsis i.e. unfinished sentences or words that are missing because the speaker feels that they are not necessary
•	self-correction

4 Other utterances such as mmm or mm can be examined. As well as a hesitation device, mm(m) is used in the following examples to show that the speaker thinks some food is tasty and to indicate that they are listening:

1	She ate with a will and, having scraped the bowl, murmured, `;Mmm… that was delicious.';
2	Mmm he painted this quite differently from from the painter but from the thing.
3	`;Mmm,'; he said crossly, not looking at her.
4	Mm mm!
5	`;Mmm,'; George muttered, without looking up.
6	Mmm, I like the sound of that.';
7	No I think it's a shame about, it doesn't really matter, mm I'm not quite sure Alex

Next in the series

Next time I'll be assessing the value of Internet search engines in researching word behaviour.

Data cited in this article has been extracted from the British National Corpus Online service, managed by Oxford University Computing Services on behalf of the BNC Consortium. All rights in the texts cited are reserved.