ABSTRACT
One of the most well known and widely used corpora in the field of corpus linguistics is the British National Corpus (BNC), which was created in the early 1990s. As time has passed, the field has demanded an updated reference point for contemporary British English, including informal conversation. This chapter presents the rationale for the construction of the new Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (Spoken BNC2014) by discussing existing English spoken corpora and explaining how no corpus since the Spoken BNC1994 has been fully comparable. This is followed by a review of published research that has used the Spoken BNC1994 as a source of data. This is used to anticipate the areas of research that may benefit the most from the construction of the Spoken BNC2014, including the study of grammar, English language teaching (ELT), sociolinguistics and discourse analysis.
