The Corpus of New York City English (CUNY-CoNYCE) is an in-progress project which aims to further the study of New York City English (namely, the varieties of English particular to New York City and the surrounding region), through the development and use of an innovative audio-aligned and parsed corpus of New Yorkers’ speech. The ultimate goal of the project is to combine recent advances in speech corpus development tools with the special talents and backgrounds of CUNY undergraduates to create a database that will be a resource for researchers in all areas of linguistics. An additional goal is to provide valuable research experience for CUNY undergraduates.

The ultimate product will be a 1-million word corpus of New York City English, with two basic components:

• Transcripts which are time-aligned with the speech signal, and fully text-searchable
• A part-of-speech tagged and parsed version of the transcripts which are searchable online using structural queries

Project PIs:

• Christina Tortora, City University of New York (College of Staten Island and The Graduate Center)
• Cecelia Cutler, City University of New York (Lehman College and The Graduate Center)
• Bill Haddican, City University of New York (Queens College and The Graduate Center)
• Michael Newman, City University of New York (Queens College and The Graduate Center)
• Beatrice Santorini, University of Pennsylvania

Research Associates and Assistants:

• C.E.A. Diertani, PhD, University of Pennsylvania; formerly at City University of New York, The Graduate Center, as CoNYCE project manager and Research Associate
• Leyla Eldridge, MA student, City University of New York, The Graduate Center, CoNYCE Research Assistant
• Kovid Pal-Odouard, NYU, Research Associate and Project Organizer

Please explore the links above for further information on this project.