This is a very rich collection of papers by very eminent scholars, which makes a comprehensive, unified statement about spoken corpus study and its essential contribution to our perception of language per se. This cutting-edge research of spoken language does not lean on commonly accepted notions and theories, but sets off to show what can be learned from spoken corpora in establishing new strategies by novel thinking. The volume includes chapters in several sections, starting with corpus compilation and corpus structure, going through corpus annotation and empirical work, dealing with the exploitation of corpora for core linguistic domains, and finally getting to other linguistic, sociolinguistic and paralinguistic domains. This volume should and hopefully will serve as an impetus to an enhanced phase in the study of spoken languages and language in general. -- Shlomo Izreel, Tel-Aviv University