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Speech Styles and Spoken Interaction in the Australian National Corpus

This special issue of the Australian Journal of Linguistics brings together a set of freshly researched studies of spoken Australian English, which have in common their use of data from the Australian National Corpus (AusNC). The AusNC initiative came from a meeting of interested parties at the Australian Linguistic Society conference in Sydney 2008, converging on the need for a national computer-based archive of Australian English and language in Australia. The AusNC has since been established at Griffith University in conjunction with Macquarie University, with support from the former HCS-Net (Human Communication and Speech Network). Support for the construction of the AusNC platform came from a 2010–2012 technology grant from the Australian National Data Service (ANDS), while AusNC’s content has been contributed by Australian linguistic researchers—diverse collections of digitized language data compiled over several decades. Only some of these collections have hitherto been available through the university where they were set up, but all are now accessible online on a single platform at the AusNC website <www.ausnc.org.au>. The present AusNC collection ranges in time over more than two centuries: from a large and diverse collection of early Australian texts representing written fiction and nonfiction from 1788 to 1895 (the COOEE corpus, i.e. Corpus of Oz Early English); to the ‘Braided Channels’ collection of videoed interviews and archival photos of people from the mid-twentieth century pastoral community on the borders of Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia and Northern Territory; to the recordings of Australian adolescents’ speech, made in the 1960s by Mitchell and Delbridge; to twenty-first century recordings of Australian radio talkback, taken from both commercial shows and the ABC (the ART corpus). There are several sociolinguistic collections from the last decade of the twentieth century, including spoken data from migrant families over several generations (in the Monash corpus), different registers of private and public speech (in the ICE-AUS corpus compiled at Macquarie University), and informal conversational data representing different age Australian Journal of Linguistics, 2014 Vol. 34, No. 1, 1–3, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2014.875451