ABSTRACT
The dramatic progress made in recent years in computational corpus linguistics has important implications for a wide range of areas of language study and applied linguistics, ranging from English language teaching (e.g. Kennedy 1992) to language variation studies (e.g. Biber and Finegan 1991). One area of application, however, which has so far received relatively little attention is clinical linguistics – that is, the application of linguistics to speech and language pathology and therapy. In the move towards the standardization of transcription and markup procedures, clinical linguistics is an area which should not be ignored. Disordered spoken discourse has a number of unique characteristics which should be allowed for in the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines (see Burnard, Chapter 5 and Johansson, Chapter 6). It is also important that these guidelines be made available in a software format appropriate for clinical linguistics practitioners if the potential of machine-readable corpora of disordered language is to be fully realized.
