Corpora: Polytechnic of Wales Corpus

[Norbert Schlueter]

Dear corpus linguists,

we are about to start a project on English child language and plan to
use the Polytechnic of Wales Corpus (POW). We have already contacted
Clive Souter, who has been so kind as to send us the accompanying
manual. Unfortunately the manual does not have an answer to all our
questions. We were therefore wondering if anyone could help us with
the following points:

1) The manual lists a number of tags but there seem to be extended
tags in the corpus, which are not described in the manual. Does anyone
know if a complete list of tags has been compiled?

2) The authors of the corpus have used some tags which are identical
to proper words like "A" and "OWN", etc. It would be nice to have a
"raw text version" of the corpus. Before we start to program
ourselves, we were wondering if anyone has already developed some
scripts or tools which have been especially written for this corpus?

3) Has anyone published results investigating lexical and grammatical
features of the POW?

Any help will be greatly appreciated. Best wishes from Berlin,

Norbert Schlüter
Freie Universität Berlin