ABSTRACT

This chapter introduces the theme of the book “Overcoming Challenges in Corpus Construction”, which is the construction of the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (Spoken BNC2014). It briefly discusses how it came to be that Lancaster University and Cambridge University Press worked together to build a successor to the original British National Corpus (BNC), which is one of the most widely used resources in the field of corpus linguistics. It discusses the aim of the book, which is to present a thorough account of the design and construction of the Spoken BNC2014, making clear the most important methodological decisions made at each stage of the process. Finally, it provides an overview of the structure of the book, which is divided into three parts representing ‘before, during and after’ corpus construction.