Corpora: BNC word Frequency List

[Paul Rayson]

Neil,

> I remember reading some time ago that a word frequency list for the BNC had
> been produced.
>
> Could anybody tell me how to get hold of this?

There was a summary posted by Philip Resnik in July, part of which
follows.

Regards,
Paul.

1a. British National Corpus (http://info.ox.ac.uk/bnc/)

   The corpus itself is available only to Europeans, but Adam
   Kilgarriff has produced word frequency lists and put them on the
   Web at http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/~Adam.Kilgarriff/bnc-readme.html.
   He writes, "the lists from the BNC on my web page - particularly
   the lemmatised ones - were produced with English teaching and
   dictionaries in mind, and have been quite widely used for
   experiment-type purposes.  The BNC is clearly appropriate, as it
   was designed with 'general English' in mind.  (though it is
   British, but I suspect the differences there are quite marginal.)
   It's been getting 200 files downloaded per month for 4 years now,
   and I think it is quite widely used."

   Adam's paper

    @article{ak-ijl,
        author = "Adam Kilgarriff", title = "Putting Frequencies into
        the Dictionary", journal = "International Journal of
        Lexicography", year = 1997, volume = 10, number = 2, pages =
        {135--155}
    }

   argues for the list and explains how it was done, and there's an
   on-line copy available from his Web page.

   Paul Rayson has been working on BNC and writes:

     I have been working on frequency lists for the second version of
     the BNC (POS tagging and file headers updated) and short versions
     of those lists will appear in

       Leech, G., Wilson, A., Rayson, P. (forthcoming). Word Frequencies
       in Spoken and Written English: based on the British National
       Corpus. Longman, London.

     Due to the size of the lists, we plan to make the longer versions
     available on the UCREL website later this year when the book is
     published.

     http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/ucrel/