CoANZSE Audio: Creation of an Online Corpus for Linguistic and Phonetic Analysis of Australian and New Zealand Englishes

Abstract

Abstract

CoANZSE Audio is a searchable online version of the Corpus of Australian and New Zealand Spoken English, a 195-million-word collection of geo-located YouTube transcripts of local government channels. In addition to the part-of-speech-tagged and lemmatized transcript data, CoANZSE Audio provides access to almost all of the underlying audio, as well as to forced alignments of the audio with transcript content, in Praat’s TextGrid format. This paper describes the methods used to create the corpus from open-source tools and the architecture of the CoANZSE Audio website. Two possible linguistic analyses based on CoANZSE Audio data are described: use of double modals, a rare syntactic feature, and raising of the mid front vowel /ɛ/ in New Zealand English. CoANZSE Audio can be considered to be among the first large, free, fully searchable online corpora containing data suitable for acoustic phonetic analyses in addition to lexical, grammatical, and discourse properties of Australian and New Zealand Englishes.