2. The British National Corpus: World Edition October 2000

1. General Notes

An initial report appeared in 1991, and a substantially revised and expanded version in early 1994.

Lead partner in consortium [[kən'sɔːtɪəm]] (an association of companies, esp. one formed for a particular purpose): Oxford University Press

The general benefits of the corpus method:

– The material collected in large computerized corpora represents authentic rather than invented language.

– Computers can process enormous amounts of data.

– The method of retrieving the data is objective rather than intuitive, which implies that studies can be replicated by other researches using the same or different corpora.

– Specific corpora selected from particular types of texts allow for comparisons of the use and frequency of certain features in different text-types, provided that the corpora are large enough.

Purpose

The uses originally envisaged for the British National Corpus were set out in a working document called Planned Uses of the British National Corpus BNCW02 (11 April 91). This document identified the following as likely application areas for the corpus:

• reference book publishing

• academic linguistic research

• language teaching

• artificial intelligence

• natural language processing

• speech processing

• information retrieval

Particularly, the database provided by the Corpus may be used:

1) as a source of examples of “real life” language usage in teaching English;

2) for finding new tendencies in language development;

3) for the investigation of a speaker’s role in language production;

4) for determining peculiarities of different registers;

5) for contrastive analysis of English as a Native Language and English as a Foreign Language;

6) for theory and practice of translation using so called “translation and parallel corpora”.

The same document identified the following categories of linguistic information derivable from the corpus:

• lexical

• semantic/pragmatic

• syntactic

• morphological

• graphological/written form/orthographical

The example of the contrastive analysis: the research in the sphere of infinitive and gerundial constructions usage has demonstrated the overuse of the infinitive construction after the word «possibility» by the students learning English as their second language. At the same time the speakers for whom English is a mother-tongue use the gerundial construction only.

General definitions

The British National Corpus is:

• a sample corpus: composed of text samples generally no longer than 45,000 words.

• a synchronic corpus: the corpus includes imaginative texts from 1960, informative texts from 1975.

• a general corpus: not specifically restricted to any particular subject field, register or genre.

• a monolingual British English corpus: it comprises text samples which are sub-stantially the product of speakers of British English.

• a mixed corpus: it contains examples of both spoken and written language.