[Corpora-List] summary of the replies to "the most user-friendly online c...

[CRuehlemann at aol.com]

Dear  Xiotian
 
Although the summary  you've posted suggests that the discussion of your 
query has come to an end I  thought it necessary to add a little pointer to 
another online corpus which does  not figure in your list but seems well worth 
mentioning particularly because it  meets your criterion of 
user-friendliness so perfectly - BNCweb, available at: _http://bncweb.lancs.ac.uk/_ 
(http://bncweb.lancs.ac.uk/) .  
This  web application of the British National Corpus was created in the 
late 1990s  expressly as a more user-friendly alternative to SARA, the 
retrieval tool issued  as part of the official BNC distribution (in its current 
incarnation known as  XAIRA). To those, like me, who have sat through many hours 
of trying to come to  grips with SARA and XAIRA, the discovery of BNCweb 
has truly been exciting. BNCweb  is not only much richer in (crucial) 
functionality (you can, for example, add  annotations and generate frequency lists 
and keyword lists) but it also  makes life for the user infinitely easier. To 
illustrate, consider the example  of the pronoun me used as a  possessive, 
as in      
_F8P 15_ 
(http://bncweb.lancs.ac.uk/cgi-binbncXML/fileInfo.pl?text=F8P&urlTest=yes)    
Me  mother  wasn't very pleased with me going to work there but I said well 
it's a  start so I stopped 
If  you want to find out, for instance, what type of noun immediately  
follows possessive me, to get  you there, XAIRA requires more than 20 clicks and 
manouvering between  various windows. In BNCweb all  you do is type in the 
string me_DPS  _NN* . 
For  a brilliant introduction to BNCweb (and, to an extent, to corpus  
linguistics in general) see: Hoffmann, Sebastian, Stefan Evert,  Nicholas Smith, 
David Lee and Ylva Berglund Prytz. (2008). Corpus Linguistics withthe BNCweb
–a  practical guide. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang. 
Chris 



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