The Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech: Problems of Corpus Design

Abstract

In recent years, the use of large corpora has revolutionized the way we study language. There are now numerous well-established corpus projects, which have set the standard for future corpus-based research. As more and more corpora are developed and technology continues to offer greater and greater scope, the emphasis has shifted from corpus size to establishing norms of good practice. There is also an increasingly critical appreciation of the crucial role played by corpus design. Corpus design can, however, present peculiar problems for particular types of source material. The Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (SCOTS) is the first large-scale corpus project specifically dedicated to the languages of Scotland, and therefore it faces many unanswered questions, which will have a direct impact on the corpus design. The first phase of the project will focus on the language varieties Scots and Scottish English, varieties that are themselves notoriously difficult to define. This paper outlines the complexities of the Scottish linguistic situation, before going on to examine the problematic issue of how to construct a well-balanced and representative corpus in what is largely uncharted territory. It argues that a well-formed corpus cannot be constructed in a linguistic vacuum, and that familiarity with the overall language population is essential before effective corpus sampling techniques, methodologies, and categorization schema can be devised. It also offers some preliminary methodologies that will be adopted by SCOTS.