[Corpora-List] Testing how representative a particular corpus is

[Matías Guzmán Naranjo]

Dear all,

A (not involved in corpus linguistics) college expressed his concerns to me
about corpus linguistics, mainly the fact that he thought oral corpora are
not really representative of spoken language, and that thus, results of
investigations that use oral corpora are not really reliable as reflecting
the wider picture of how people speak and use language. My question is
whether there have been studies done about how representative are, say
phone recordings, or semi-guided interviews, of actual spoken language.

I use oral corpora for my work but just assume that semi-guided interviews
are somewhat representative of spoken language outside semi-guided
interviews, and that the results do generalize to some degree to the rest
of situations, but I ad never really thought about testing this assumption.

Best,

Matías Guzmán Naranjo
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