Corpus as a slice of life: Representing naturally occurring language and its speakers

Discourse is subject to numerous forces that shape its form. One force that is underestimated is the interactional dynamic among interlocutors. In devising the criteria that inform data selection for a corpus of spoken discourse, designers may end up prioritizing the collection of spontaneous discourse and overlook the fact that this type of discourse can still display artificial interactional dynamics. We propose an approach to spoken corpus compilation that aims at preserving naturally occurring interactional dynamics by choosing as focus of the corpus the representation of participants’ lives. Through the analysis of speech events collected in different projects, we demonstrate the advantages of sourcing naturally occurring discourse over spontaneous data. We then discuss a series of practices that the authors implemented in different contexts to ensure the collection of naturally occurring data. We argue that this framework yields the construction of corpora that are representative not only of a language, but also of the lives of its users.