The making of a BNC customised spoken corpus for comparative purposes

Although the British National Corpus (BNC) is one of the most popular resources for linguistic research, only a small number of studies generate results from user-selected texts of the corpus, despite the fact that the BNC is designed with the intention of letting researchers choose specific texts to build their own sub-corpora (Burnage and Dunlop, 1993). This paper reports on the process of building a tailor-made spoken corpus out of the BNC for comparative purposes and attempts to address the practical issues involved in selecting specific texts from the BNC spoken sub-section for one's individual needs. It would, thus, be of particular interest and relevance to those who wish to use (parts of) existing corpora for contrastive research. It is hoped that the issues raised in this paper could serve as a note of caution for future sub-corpus compilation from existing corpora, especially with regard to the BNC.