The seminar will provide an overview of the spoken corpus, The Aston Corpus of West Midlands English. One of the (unintended) outcomes of several funded projects by The Leverhulme Trust and the ESRC into discourse and sociocultural identity in the West Midlands region of the UK has resulted in the collection of a significant amount of spoken data.
This data takes the form of four distinct categories: performance data (comedy, drama sketches, poetry); interviews with performers, interviews with audience members at performances and interviews with local and national celebrities associated with the region. Although collected ethnographically and qualitatively, the amount of data is such that quantitative data analysis has been made possible to complement qualitative analysis. Data has been transcribed using the program EXMARaLDA, that allows for different layers of transcription to be annotated simultaneously - in this case, orthographically and using IPA (to which an intonation layer has yet to be added) in ways that allow consideration of form and function to occur independently of one another as well as together in context.