Spoken Corpora Design: Their Constitutive Parameters

From a linguistic point of view, spoken corpora should be primary for research but that has not been the case so far. Hence, the problem of what should be included in the corpora has hardly ever been considered. Often it would appear that anything spoken is included on an ad hoc basis. The need and scarcity of real prototypical spoken corpora points to a necessity of mapping the field in its entirety and identifying its relevant parameters. In order to do this the present paper translates the major differences between spoken and written texts into usable parameters. Ultimately this could enable the setting up of a representative spoken corpus with a clear core of real and typical spoken language, etc.