My thanks to David Purdy, Eric Atwell and Ute Romer for their responses.
I'll have a look at the corpora suggested, though I suspect none are going
to serve me the required information on a silver platter :) Transcribing
a *few* of Kennedy's sentences would certainly an interesting exercise.
A few clarifications on my question. The problem I have in mind is
investigating phonological rules that only apply in fast speech. An
example of the kind of rule I have in mind would be stops
at the end of unstressed syllables of English getting deleted or
glottalised. As I am quite unfamiliar with the fast speech literature,
finding a corpus of it seemed a good starting point.
[Ute: there are plenty of phonetically transcribed corpii around;
TIMIT has 6300 (read, not spontaneous) sentences, each with about 30-40
phones. That's still less than a fifth of a million words, true...
Switchboard is a much smaller corpus, of spontaneous speech, also
phone-transcribed. I haven't looked at speeds there.]
As for the definition of 'fast', I'm not sure. Word rate is probably a
better definition than phone rate since limits on articulatory
apparatus ought to lead to fast speakers eating phones instead of words.
[Interesting statistic for general reference: in TIMIT, the distribution
of phone rate is close to Normal: mean = 13.71, stdev = 1.95
(Mirghafori, Fosler and Morgan 1995).]
Dinoj Surendran
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