The London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English: Description and research Edited by Jan Svartvik (review)

196LANGUAGE, VOLUME 68, NUMBER 1 (1992) ------. 1975. Austro-Thai language and culture. New Haven: Human Relations Area Files Press. ------. 1985. Toppakö: Tönan Ajia no gengo kara Nihongo e. Hi no kami no tami no kigen [A breakthrough: From the languages of East Asia to Japanese. The origin of the people of the sun god]. Translated by Nishi Yoshio. Tokyo: Project on Lexicographical Analysis, National Inter-University Research Institute of Asian & African Languages & Cultures. Edmondson, Jerold A., and David B. Solnit (eds.) 1988. Comparative Kadai: Linguistic studies beyond Tai. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics & University of Texas at Arlington. ------, ------. 1988. Introduction. In Edmondson & Solnit, 1-17. Edmondson, Jerold A., and Yang Quan. 1988. Word-initial preconsonants and the history of Kam-Sui resonant initials and tones. In Edmondson & Solnit, 143-66. Haudricourt, André-Georges. 1956. De la restitution des initiales dans les langages monosyllabiques: Le problème du thai commun. Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 52.307-22. ------. 1967. La langue lakkia. Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 62.16582 . ------. 1975. À propos du puzzle de W. J. Gedney. Studies in Tai linguistics in honor of William J. Gedney, ed. by Jimmy G. Harris and James R. Chamberlain, 252-8. Bangkok: Central Institute of English Language, Office of State Universities. Maddieson, Ian. 1984. Patterns of sounds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miller, R. A. 1987. Review of Benedict 1985. Lg. 63.643-8. Shibatani, Masayoshi. 1990. The languages of Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Starostin, S. A. 1986. Problema geneticeskoi obscnosti altaiskikh jazykov. Istorikokul 'turnye kontakty narodov altaiskoijazykovoi obsönosti. Tezisy dokladow XXIX sessii Postoiannoi Mezdunarodnoi Altaisticeskoi konferencii [PIAC], v. 2, 94-112. Moscow. Thomason, Sarah Grey, and Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language contact, creolization , and genetic linguistics. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press. Thompson, Laurence C. 1976. Proto-Viet-Muong phonology. Austroasiatic Studies, vol. 2, ed. by Philip N. Jenner, Laurence C. Thompson, and Stanley Starosta, 1113-204. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Department of Asian Languages[Received 24 May 1991.] and Cultures University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285 The London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English: Description and research. Edited by Jan Svartvik. (Lund studies in English 82.) Lund: Lund University Press, 1990. Pp. 350. Reviewed by W. Nelson Francis, Brown University The thirteen papers which comprise this volume are all concerned in one way or another with the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English (LLC). The dominant theme is the development of a realistic text-to-speech computer program —one in which written or printed English is converted into a naturalistic counterpart of spoken English. Such a program must produce not only the REVIEWS197 correct sequence of phonetic realizations of phonemes—which by itself produces the monotonous type of talk attributed to robots in popular films—but also a natural intonation and segmentation into tone units, often separated by various lengths of pauses with or without the fillers that carry on vocalism across a gap in the running context of meaningful speech. The relationship between syntactic-semantic structure, including punctuation, and phonic structure is by no means a simple one; many aspects of this relationship are addressed in the book under review. The opening chapter (11-59), by Svartvik, the head of the LLC projects, and Sidney Greenbaum, the present director of the Survey of English Usage (SEU) on which these projects depend, gives a short description and history of the LLC and an inventory of its contents. This corpus comprises the spoken half of SEU, the million-word corpus of educated English collected at University College London under the direction of Sir Randolph Quirk, the former Quain Professor there. The entire corpus contains 200 texts of 5000 words each, half of which were recorded from various types of spoken English, some of it public (e.g. radio programs) and some of it private. The latter was in part recorded surreptitiously, a practice disallowed in the United States in spite of its value for capturing speech at its most natural and least self-conscious. The corpus was transcribed in London in standard orthography but using a rather elaborate system for recording intonation (see Crystal 1969). The LLC transfers this transcription to a...