Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (NECTE)

The 1960–1970's recordings were gathered by Vince McNeaney during the SSRC-funded "Tyneside Linguistic Survey" (TLS) undertaken by Barbara Strang (Principal Investigator), John Pellowe and associates of Newcastle University. The corpus originally consisted of 86 loosely-structured 30-minute interviews recorded onto analog reel-to-reel tapes. Their informants were drawn from a stratified random sample of Gateshead in North-East England and were divided among various social class groupings of male and female speakers, with young, middle, and old age cohorts represented. The TLS collected very detailed social data from its interviewees including lifestyle factors such as details of leisure activities, voting preferences, attitudes to education and parental discipline. The interviews covered a range of topics, and speakers were encouraged to talk about their life histories and their attitudes to the local dialect. At the end of the interview, they were asked whether they knew/used traditional dialect words and were also asked for native speaker judgements of constructions containing vernacular morphosyntax. The more recent of the two corpora was collected in the Tyneside area between 1991 and 1994 for the ESRC-funded "Phonological Variation and Change in Contemporary Spoken English" (PVC) project (R000234892) undertaken by Gerard Docherty, James Milroy, Lesley Milroy (Principal Investigator) and associates of the University of Newcastle. The materials comprise 18 digital audio tapes, each of roughly 60 minutes' duration. Dyads of friends or relatives were encouraged to converse freely about a wide range of topics with minimal interference from the fieldworker (Penny Oxley), and informants were again equally divided between various social class groupings of male and female speakers in young, middle, and old age cohorts. The PVC project recorded much more minimal social data, categorizing subjects according to gender (male, female), age and social class (upper, lower working class, middle class, lower middle class).

Project leader: Professor Karen P. Corrigan
Time of compilation: 2000–2005
Language: English
Number of texts/samples: 114
Period: 1969–1994
Released: 2005

Reference line and Copyright

The Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English.

Manual

A full set of documentation and a manual is available at: http://research.ncl.ac.uk/necte/

Compilers

Karen Corrigan, School Of English Literature, Language And Linguistics, Newcastle University
Hermann Moisl, School Of English Literature, Language And Linguistics, Newcastle University
Joan Beal, School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, University of Sheffield

Availability

Please visit: http://research.ncl.ac.uk/necte/ and download an access request form which should be completed and sent to: k.p.corrigan@ncl.ac.uk

CoRD Entry submitted on July 30, 2007 by Prof. Karen P. Corrigan, School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University
Information for the entry was edited by Prof. Karen P. Corrigan.