Lexis, indirectness and politeness in operator calls
Tony McEnery, Paul Baker, Christine Cheepen · 2002
This paper presents work undertaken for British Telecom on their corpus of calls to the operator: the so-called 100 Corpus. Our aim in analysing this corpus was to explore the distinctiveness of the language used by both the caller and the operator in the corpus. In achieving this goal we have, from time to time, compared the 100 Corpus to other corpora: the spoken and written sections of the British National Corpus (BNC), and a corpus of operatorcaller conversations from a train booking office.