Everyday Conversation Corpus as an Archive of Society

Abstract

This study demonstrates that everyday conversation corpus can be seen as an archive of the society through a series of analysis of conversation in the Corpus of Everyday Japanese Conversation (CEJC). CEJC is a corpus constructed by the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL) that consists of 200 hours of natural conversation recorded from 2016 to 2020. At the period, our everyday life is significantly changed due to COVID-19, which is also the case for the conversation in the corpus. To show the availability of the corpus as an archive, a few excerpts of office meetings which are recorded at the period of the beginning of COVID-19 in a dental clinic are analyzed. In the excerpts participants are talking about prevention of infection. Through the analysis, it is shown that social concerns are dealt with in relation to the position of the participants. It can be said that the data in the corpus is substantial enough to be analysed in detail, which is to be mentioned as a strength of everyday conversation corpus as archives of society.