The need for a corpus of spoken Greek derives in principle from the significance modern linguistics attributes in general to spoken over written discourse. Taking, however, also into account the findings of sociolinguistics, the study of spoken discourse ought to be grounded in language material drawn from naturally-occurring circumstances of communication so that its spontaneous and unconstrained production is possible. The Corpus of Spoken Greek responds to these needs. It contains only naturally-occurring talk, which, additionally, comes from dialogic (e.g., telephone calls, TV-interviews with politicians) rather than monologic (e.g., lectures or presentations) interaction. Moreover, a large part of the material consists of talk produced in private, everyday interaction among friends and/or relatives (see below).
The Corpus of Spoken Greek was originally compiled for the qualitative analysis of language and linguistic communication, especially from the perspective of Conversation Analysis. Consequently, particular emphasis is placed on the transcription of audio-/video-recorded material for representing the acoustic/optic reality reliably. For Conversation Analysis, transcription is not a mechanistic procedure nor is it confined to reproducing the content. On the contrary, the 'translation' of sound into writing requires theoretical processing and analysis, presupposes related training, and has to undergo multiple 'corrections' by different individuals.
As a result, the transcribed texts of the Corpus of Spoken Greek depart from the standard orthographic representation of spoken discourse in that additional symbols are used to mark overlaps, pauses, intonational and other features of spoken discourse (see Transcription symbols). It should be noted that the texts also vary in detail and quality of transcription.