Corpora: Query: broadcast conversations

[LDC Office]

Dear Brita,

The Bramshill corpus doesn't exactly match your
needs, but you may find it useful.  The corpus is a
collection of conversations in British English.
Though the conversations took place over the
telephone, reference recordings were made using a
high quality dynamic microphone of each speaker.
These higher quality recordings, not the telephone
speech, are provided in the Bramshill collection.
Transcripts of the conversations are also included.

Each speaker was given a pile of photographs. In
response to a bleep signal, each speaker introduced
himself by name and read a set of test sentences.
After this, the main part of the conversation took
place, in which participants were asked to determine
which of each pair of photographs had been taken
first (if indeed they were related at all).  The
conversations continued for 10 minutes until
terminated by another bleep signal.

For more details on Bramshill please visit our catalog at:
http://morph.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/LDC94S20.html

Further documentation on transcription conventions is
available at:
http://morph.ldc.upenn.edu/readme_files/bhill.readme.html

Please feel free to contact me with any questions.

Best regards,

Shannon Sears
Manager, Intellectual Property Rights and Membership
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Linguistic Data Consortium	    Phone: (215) 898-0464
3615 Market Street		    Fax:   (215) 573-2175
Suite 200			    email: ssears at ldc.upenn.edu
Philadelphia, PA 19104-2608	    www: http://www.ldc.upenn.edu


> > I'm asking your help for a student of mine working on her M.A.
> > thesis. She needs transcipts of live broadcasts of fairly
> > informal multiparty conversations in British English?
> >
> > The materials are needed for a contrastive study of
> > simultaneous speech in conversations by Swedish-speaking
> > Finns and speakers of British English. If you wonder at the
> > choice of material, the English material has to be chosen
> > according to the Swedish material, because there is very little of
> > any transcribed spoken Finland-Swedish available. The Swedish
> > material is used courtesy of the project 'Finlandssvenska
> > samtalsstrategier' SVESTRA at the University of Helsinki
> > (http://www.nord.helsinki.fi/svestra.html). It is a
> > transcription of a 95 minute radio program broadcast live on New
> > Year's Eve 1989. The interlocutors are three women and three
> > men, one of each acting as host. Their ages range from 21 to
> > 89. The conversation is fairly informal as it takes place
> > over a dinner and drinks suitable to the occasion.
> > I have checked your catalogues as best I could, but I didn't
> > find descriptions of individual items that would have shown
> > whether any samples in the collections are close enough in
> > terms of style, participants and channel to the Swedish
> > materials. Or have I overlooked something obvious?
> > If this query should have been sent to somebody else please
> > forward it.
> > Thank you in advance for your help.
> >
> > Kind regards
> >
> > Brita
> > ---------------------------------------
> > Brita Warvik
> > Donner Lecturer in Text and Corpus Linguistics
> > Department of English                           Tel. + 358 2
> > 215 4360 Abo Akademi University                          Fax
> > + 358 215 4436 Fin-20500 Turku, Finland
> >  http://www.abo.fi/fak/hf/enge