Καταγράφοντας την ελληνική γλώσσα [Making a record of the Greek language]

This is the second volume in the series Studies in Spoken Discourse published by the Institute of Modern Greek Studies (INS) and brings to the fore one of the tacit assumptions underlying the studies of the first volume (Greek Language & Spoken Communication, 2015): that the adequate empirical description of a language presupposes the availability of naturally recorded spoken discourse, in audio/video as well as transcribed form. It is this need that the Institute’s Corpus of Spoken Greek (compiled in the framework of the research project Greek Talk-in-Interaction and Conversation Analysis) seeks to fulfill.

The primary goal of this publication is to present the Institute’s Corpus of Spoken Greek to researchers of the Greek language as well as to a wider audience. The volume is organized in two parts. Part A sketches out the general framework for corpora compilation and the basic principles of Conversation Analysis, which constitutes the theoretical backbone of the Corpus, and describes its distinctive features and components. Part B comprises transcribed samples (full ‘units’) of naturally occurring talk drawn from different communicative contexts (everyday conversations, telephone calls, classroom interaction, television news bulletins, broadcast political interviews). For the Greek language, the volume is a unique addition to an international practice that has contributed to the development of corpus linguistics through the publication of transcribed texts.

The book’s editor, Th.-S. Pavlidou, is professor emerita at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.