[Corpora-List] The Bank of English as a monitor corpus

[Adam Kilgarriff]

ah, but Mark, you're the only one with the genre-balanced, time-balanced
corpus we all dream of :-)
Adam

2009/9/21 Mark Davies <Mark_Davies at byu.edu>

> A number of books and articles on corpus linguistics have commented on the
> (possible) use of the Bank of English as a monitor corpus (e.g. McEnery and
> Wilson 2001:30-31, Meyer 2002:15, Hunston 2002:30-31, Sampson and McCarthy
> 2004:396-98, McEnery et al 2006:67-70, Baker et al 2006:65).
>
> I'm having trouble, however, finding many articles that have *actually
> used* the BoE as a monitor corpus -- i.e. looking at recent *changes* in
> English (rather than just synchronic phenomena). I can find Rudanko 2003,
> 2005, 2007, and that's about it. I've mainly been using the LLBA and MLA
> bibliographies to look for these.
>
> I've been using the BoE myself recently (via wordbanks.harpercollins.co.uk),
> and I'm finding it a bit problematic. The genre balance changes so much over
> time that I'm not quite sure how one could/would use the data. For example,
> fiction is 29% of the US part of the corpus for 1990-94, but only 16% for
> 1995-99. Therefore, for any given change, one could never really know if it
> reflects actual shifts in the language, or whether it is simply an artifact
> that represents a changing genre balance in the corpus.
>
> Anyway, if anyone is aware of other studies dealing with this topic, I'd
> appreciate hearing about them. I'll post the responses if there is
> sufficient interest.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Mark
>
> ============================================
> Mark Davies
> Professor of (Corpus) Linguistics
> Brigham Young University
> (phone) 801-422-9168 / (fax) 801-422-0906
>
> http://davies-linguistics.byu.edu
>
> ** Corpus design and use // Linguistic databases **
> ** Historical linguistics // Language variation **
> ** English, Spanish, and Portuguese **
> ============================================
>
>
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-- 
================================================
Adam Kilgarriff
http://www.kilgarriff.co.uk
Lexical Computing Ltd                   http://www.sketchengine.co.uk
Lexicography MasterClass Ltd      http://www.lexmasterclass.com
Universities of Leeds and Sussex       adam at lexmasterclass.com
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