Using Online Interfaces to Query Mega Corpora
Martin Weißer · 2015
While smaller corpora may often not allow us to make as many generalisations about language as we might want to, modern mega corpora, such as the BNC, ANC, or COCA, offer remarkable possibilities for investigating general aspects of language and drawing more valid conclusions from them. This chapter explores two of these web interfaces, one that allows us to work with the BNC for general British English, and the other with the COCA, for investigating features of American English. It uses knowledge on specifying linguistic patterns and working with PoS tags, in order to fine-tune the searches. BNCweb is a web interface to the BNC which is fairly straightforward to use. Essentially, being a concordance facility, some of its basic features are rather similar to those of AntConc. Unlike the BNC, the COCA can only be accessed through its interface at Brigham Young University.