The Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English (DCPSE)

An 800,000 word corpus of spontaneous spoken British English containing equal amounts of directly comparable material from 1960-1976 and from the early 1990s. The corpus is textually annotated (marking sentence boundaries, speakers, overlaps etc.), as well as grammatically annotated (tagged and parsed), indexed, and fully searchable with ICECUP, using Fuzzy Tree Fragments and other query systems. The resource features a lexicon (a database of word-tag combinations in the corpus) and a grammaticon (a database of node combinations). These will enable users to contrast lexical and grammatical distributions in the LLC and ICE. The resource is an invaluable research tool for linguists interested in present-day English grammar, as well as for those interested in current changes in this domain.