Looking for a corpus of English..

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Howie - 16 Feb 2004 12:41 GMT

Hello all,

I am doing a dissertation which requires me to use a wide corpus
of English. I have looked at the BNC and the Bank of English but
the costs are prohibitive as I am funding this myself.

Has anyone any idea where I might get a corpus of a few million
words which I use for concordancing and word frequency-of-use
analysis?

I would really appreciate any help or advice you guys could give
me.

Thanks,

Howard.

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Howard Coakley
e-mail... howard<dot}coakleyatcoakley<dot].codotuk
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Django Cat - 16 Feb 2004 21:50 GMT

Try the Hong Kong VLC Concordancer at http://vlc.polyu.edu.hk/ . There's
also one at the University of Michigan you can probably Google.

DC

> Hello all,
>
[quoted text clipped - 12 lines]
>
> Howard.

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Howie - 18 Feb 2004 10:13 GMT

|Try the Hong Kong VLC Concordancer at http://vlc.polyu.edu.hk/ . There's
|also one at the University of Michigan you can probably Google.
|
|DC

I appreciate that. I was really looking for something a bit
larger, and wider (in terms of genre). But this is a good start.
Thanks.

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Howard Coakley
e-mail... howard<dot}coakleyatcoakley<dot].codotuk
ICQ:4502837. (Try ICQ at www.icq.com)

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Django Cat - 18 Feb 2004 20:44 GMT

> I was really looking for something a bit
> larger, and wider (in terms of genre).

Well, if you don't care if it's online or not, you could buy a copy of the
Longman mini-concordancer - it's cheap (about 30GBP I think) and cheerful
and quite flexible. You load in your own corpus which the concordancer
then handles for you - so as long as you can get machine loadable texts
using the net and/or project Guitenburg (but I think Proj G is only out of
copyright material, so you're looking at language which is 50 years + old)
you'd be away.

Good luck
DCC

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Howie - 19 Feb 2004 15:24 GMT

|> I was really looking for something a bit
|> larger, and wider (in terms of genre).
[quoted text clipped - 9 lines]
|Good luck
|DCC

Hi,

I have used wordsmith - which is free ATM. It's the corpus which
is the problem, and this is what I am searching for (in vain - it
seems) !

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Django Cat - 19 Feb 2004 19:36 GMT

> |> I was really looking for something a bit
> |> larger, and wider (in terms of genre).
[quoted text clipped - 19 lines]
> is the problem, and this is what I am searching for (in vain - it
> seems) !

What sort of texts do you need? Could you create your corpus by cutting
and pasting large chunks of writing off the net?

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Howie - 21 Feb 2004 13:07 GMT

|What sort of texts do you need? Could you create your corpus by cutting
|and pasting large chunks of writing off the net?

Hi again,

I _could_, - but the time this might take would be a bit
prohibitive and wouldn't really give me a wide enough variety of
English-in-use.

I don't mind written language, but I would really choose a few
million words of non-legal text if I had a free choice.

H.

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Discussion Groups / ESL Teaching / February 2004

Looking for a corpus of English..