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12 DON’T ASK, LOOK!
(BNC); for American English, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). 6 The
BNC is a relatively large, closed corpus of texts of written and spoken language. It contains
approximately 100 million words in texts dating from 1960 to 1994. 7 COCA is not closed;
every year approximately 20 million words are added. At present, the corpus contains about
450 million words from more than 175,000 texts dated from 1990 to the present (2012). 8
Both BNC and COCA are freely accessible for scientific purposes. The essentially identical
search interfaces for both are provided by Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. The
available search algorithms are quite powerful, allowing queries for exact strings as well as
lemmata (i.e., words disregarding inflexions, such as ‘hope’, ‘hopes’, ‘hoped’, and ‘hoping’).
The corpora are annotated, allowing queries for strings of certain grammatical categories
(e.g., ‘hope’ as a noun vs. a verb). It is possible to search for the co-occurrence of expressions
within a distance of 10 words (unfortunately, this function ignores sentence boundaries).
4.2 Four Benefits of Using Corpora
So, what are the benefits of using corpora?
First of all, corpora provide data on the basis of which hypotheses can be formulated, they
provide data to confirm or falsify hypotheses and conclusions from the analytical process, and
they provide data that can be used to exemplify or illustrate specific usages of interest.
And, secondly, all of these data are, by and large, unfiltered.
Not all corpora fulfil all of these functions equally well, of course. All corpora provide some
linguistic context for the queried expressions, but wider contexts (more than one or two sentences)
are not always provided. There are several corpora that, for copyright reasons, do not
give free access to the texts that constitute their basic data. Yet a relatively thorough consideration
of context may be required to formulate substantial and interesting hypotheses, especially
when an analytical task is first approached. And sometimes the meaning of a word can
be understood only when the wider context of its use is known.
Another important property of corpora is size. Hypotheses are best tested with a large corpus
that, due to its size, contains rare linguistic phenomena. It is important to keep in mind that
hypotheses claiming the non-existence of some phenomenon cannot be proved, and hypotheses
claiming the existence of some phenomenon cannot be disproved by a corpus analysis.
However, if a corpus is very large and comprises a balanced mixture of texts, we can base at
least tentative claims about the existence or non-existence of phenomena on it.
Regardless of the width of the context provided, there are two further benefits of using corpora.
Thirdly, the contexts in which the queried expressions are found give insights into the variety
of real-life situations in which the phenomenon referred to by the concept occurs.
And finally, the contexts often provide excellent raw material for thought experiments with
regard to the concept and the phenomenon in question.
5. A Few Remarks on Other Options
There are two alternatives to the use of corpora that I would like to address briefly. The first is
the use of Internet search engine queries.
6
The corpora are accessible at http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/and http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.
7
The online interface dates the texts in BNC to “1970s–1993” (cf. http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/). My deviation
from this information is based on Leech, Rayson, and Wilson 2001: 1.
8
For the sake of comparison, the largest accessible German corpus, DEREKO, contains 10 million texts
with 2.3 billion (10 9 ) words.