Antoinette Renouf

WebCorp: an integrated system for web text search

The web has unique potential to yield large-volume data on up-to-date language use, obvious shortcomings notwithstanding. Since 1998, we have been developing a tool, WebCorp, to allow corpus linguists to retrieve raw and analysed linguistic output from the web. Based on internal trials and user feedback gleaned from our site (http://www. webcorp.org.uk/), we have established a working system which supports thousands of regular users world-wide. Many of the problems associated with the nature of web text have been accommodated, but problems remain, some due to the non-implementation of standards on the Internet, and others to reliance on commercial search engines, which mediation slows up average WebCorp response time and places constraints on linguistic search. To improve WebCorp performance, we are in the process of creating a tailored search engine, an infrastructure in which WebCorp will play an integral and enhanced role. In this paper, we shall give a brief description of WebCorp, the nature and level of its current functionality, the linguistic and procedural problems in web text search which remain; and the benefits of replacing the commercial search engine with tailored websearch architecture.

WebCorp: providing a renewable data source for corpus linguists

The many electronic text corpora available nowadays present ever fewer obstacles to a wide range of corpus linguistic study. However, corpora are expensive resources to create and to update, and there remain problems for linguists if they seek access to very large, very recent, or changing language. The World Wide Web, whilst intended as an information source, is an obvious resource for the retrieval of linguistic information, being the largest store of texts in existence, freely-available, covering a range of domains, and constantly added to and updated. Individual linguistic researchers have been trying to retrieve instances of rare or neologistic language use from the web by manipulating existing web search engines. Whilst this strategy is possible, in particular via Google, the output is rather haphazard and not linguist-friendly. The Research and Development Unit for English Studies has been seeking to remedy the situation through the creation of ‘WebCorp’, a tool designed to search the Internet and provide on-line tailored access to linguists. A demonstration tool is available at http://www.webcorp.org.uk. This paper will report on the research initiative and highlight some of the issues involved.

Corpus development 25 years on: from super-corpus to cyber-corpus

By the early 1980s, corpus linguists were still considered maverick and were still pushing at the boundaries of language-processing technology, but a culture was slowly bootstrapping itself into place, as successive research results (e.g. Collins-Cobuild Dictionary) encouraged the sense that empirical data analysis was a sine qua non for linguists, and a terminology of corpus linguistics was emerging that allowed ideas to take form. This paper reviews the evolution of text corpora over the period 1980 to the present day, focussing on three milestones as a means of illustrating changing definitions of ‘corpus’ as well as some contemporary theoretical and methodological issues. The first milestone is the 20-million-word Birmingham Corpus (1980-1986), the second is the ‘dynamic’ corpus (1990-2004); the third is the ‘Web as corpus’ (1998-2004).

The accidental corpus: some issues in extracting linguistic information from the Web

The Web is a text store which can potentially supplement traditional corpora as a source of up-to-date linguistic data. The WebCorp project investigates this potential, and in its second year tackles some residual problems inherent in the nature of Web text, thereby refining its retrieval and analysis tool for the facilitation of corpus linguistic study.

The Time Dimension in Modern English Corpus Linguistics

The corpus-based analysis of modern English tends to focus on language which has been written or spoken at a particular point in time, and a corpus is conventionally set up as synchronic entity. A synchronic study is often entirely appropriate, but language is a changing phenomenon, and linguists are also interested in that dimension: curious to trace an earlier language feature through to the present, or a current feature back to its source, and in studying recent changes in language use.Within this context, I shall discuss new developments in three areas of research activity: firstly, the setting up of a means of tracing morphological, lexical and semantic changes in Modern English text across time; secondly, the use of the web as a linguistic resource; and thirdly, the coordination of methodologies and resources in modern and historical corpus linguistics.

Neology: from word to register

In this paper, we investigate the context within which a neologism occurs. A pilot study of a diachronic journalistic corpus confirms that a coinage or new word formation which names or is associated with a major topical event will often not occur in isolation, but become part of a communal and cumulative activity. Further novel language use will emerge and ‘converge’ at around the same time, as will lexical, semantic and grammatical variants of existing words. If the new real-world area of concern is sustained in the media, these words and phrases begin to co-occur, forming a loose inter-collocational network which we deem to be an incipient ‘register’. The paper will provide data centred on neologistic activity in UK journalism in mid-late 2011, reflecting the response of the UK leadership to the national economic crisis, and its ripple effect through social institutions and the media. The findings may serve to alert English language practitioners to the merits of examining the larger context of a neologism to discover further interrelated new words, and novel ways of representing lexical information.

The corpus-user’s chorus: (Based on The Major General's Song from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance)

This volume is witness to a spirited and fruitful period in the evolution of corpus linguistics. In twenty-two articles written by established corpus linguists, members of the ICAME (International Computer Archive of Modern and Mediaeval English) association, this new volume brings the reader up to date with the cycle of activities which make up this field of study as it is today, dealing with corpus creation, language varieties, diachronic corpus study from the past to present, present-day synchronic corpus study, the web as corpus, and corpus linguistics and grammatical theory. It thus serves as a valuable guide to the state of the art for linguistic researchers, teachers and language learners of all persuasions. After over twenty years of evolution, corpus linguistics has matured, incorporating nowadays not just small, medium and large primary corpus building but also specialised and multi-dimensional secondary corpus building; not just corpus analysis, but also corpus evaluation; not just an initial application of theory, but self-reflection and a new concern with theory in the light of experience. The volume also highlights the growing emphasis on language as a changing phenomenon, both in terms of established historical study and the newer short-range diachronic study of 20th century and current English; and the growing area of overlap between these two. Another section of the volume illustrates the recent changes in the definition of ‘corpus’ which have come about due to the emergence of new technologies and in particular of the availability of texts on the world wide web. The volume culminates in the contributions by a group of corpus grammarians to a timely and novel discussion panel on the relationship between corpus linguistics and grammatical theory.