Building a podcast corpus for linguistic and phonetic research

The aim of this project is to build a simple corpus (basically a transcribed collection) of Any questions? podcasts. Any questions? is a weekly Radio 4 programme in which a panel of politicians and commentators answer audience members’ questions on current affairs. It’s a good programme to use for research into English pronunciation patterns in particular, especially if you’re interested in ‘standard educated’ accents, spontaneous but meant-to-be-clear speech, and the realisation of frequent words and phrases in a particular social setting or mode of discourse. Building the corpus involves downloading, converting, chunking and transcribing podcasts using Audacity and Praat.

Relevant fields of linguistics

• Phonetics
• Sociolinguistics
• Interactional linguistics

This project is suitable for students at all levels, especially those who might want to use the corpus for their dissertation project in the future.

Start date: Semester 1, 2015-16 (precise date to be agreed).

End date: 6 weeks later           

Hours per week: 3

Activities to be undertaken by RES student:

• Transcribing audio files that have already been prepared from the original Any questions? podcasts, using Praat and Word.
• Downloading new podcasts, which are published weekly, and preparing them for transcription using Audacity and Praat.

Number of possible students: 4

Likely outcomes:

• Expertise in audio file processing using Audacity and Praat
• Expertise in the use of Praat scripts
• Expertise in transcribing English speech
• Insight into the data collection phase of the research process

Students who have questions about this project should contact Dr Leendert Plug on [email protected]

If you would like to work on this project, please complete an RES application form. If your application is successful, the supervisor will be in touch in due course.