Facilitating a description of intercultural conversations: the Hong Kong Corpus of Conversational English

The relative difficulty with which spoken corpora can be compiled by the researcher compared with written discourses, coupled with the time needed to fully transcribe spoken data, to say nothing of the additional expenses involved, inevitably has made large spoken corpora a far rarer entity than written corpora. And yet, if we are to further unravel the intricacies of spoken discourse, we need to work with large, representative corpora of spoken discourses. The two largest corpora of the English language, the Bank of English and the British National Corpus, devote approximately 10 per cent of their corpora to spoken English. This is not to say that spoken discourse has been forgotten or ignored by corpus linguists. The London-Lund Corpus, for example, has been an invaluable source of data for many years, and projects such as COLT (see eg Andersen and Sten-ström 1996) and CANCODE (see eg Carter and McCarthy 1997; McCarthy and Carter 1997) are evidence of more recent initiatives to compile spoken corpora. Conversations are the most prevalent form of discourse, accounting for more than 90 per cent of all spoken language according to Svartvik (1980) and yet, compared to more specialised spoken discourse types and written discourses, they do not receive proportionately anything like that amount of attention from researchers investigating language use. As mentioned above, only a relatively small proportion of the Bank of English and the British National Corpus is made up of naturally-occurring conversations, as opposed to other types of spoken discourse. Almost two decades after Svartvik and others had made the London-Lund Corpus available in scholarly form, Svartvik (1996: 10) was still bemoan-ing the fact that 'conversation – the quintessence of spoken language – is either missing or seriously underestimated in most existing corpora'. However, while there have been relatively few studies on native speaker conversations (see eg