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height="443" alt=""> </div> </a> <div id="content" class="site-content"> <div id="primary" class="content-area"> <main id="main" class="site-main" role="main"> <article id="post-1058" class="post-1058 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-the-english-language tag-business-english tag-corpus tag-english-language tag-language-teaching tag-linguistics"> <div class="entry-wrapper"> <header class="entry-header"> <h1 class="entry-title">A few words on corpus linguistics</h1> <div class="entry-meta"> <span class="posted-on">On <a href="https://dictionaryblog.cambridge.org/2011/12/12/a-few-words-on-corpus-linguistics/" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date published" datetime="2011-12-12T09:00:01+00:00">December 12, 2011</time><time class="updated" datetime="2011-12-12T11:00:14+00:00">December 12, 2011</time></a></span><span class="byline"> By <span class="author vcard"><a class="url fn n" href="https://dictionaryblog.cambridge.org/author/aezrac/">Ron Carter</a></span></span><span class="cat-links">In <a href="https://dictionaryblog.cambridge.org/category/the-english-language/" rel="category tag">the English language</a></span> </div> </header> <div class="entry-content"> <p><strong>Part 1 of 2</strong><strong> </strong></p> <p>by <a href="http://dictionaryblog.cambridge.org/ron-carter/" target="_blank">Ron Carter</a></p> <p><em>In the first of a two-part blog entry, Prof. Ronald Carter of the University of Nottingham provides a brief introduction to corpora and corpus linguistics, exploring ways in which corpora are currently being used to inform language teaching and the development of teaching materials.</em></p> <p><strong>What is a corpus?</strong></p> <p><strong>corpus</strong><em> <strong>noun </strong></em>(<em>plural<strong> </strong></em><strong>corpuses </strong>or <strong>corpora</strong>) the collection of a single writer’s work or of writing about a particular subject, or <strong>a large amount of written and sometimes spoken material collected to show the state of a language</strong></p> <p><em>Cambridge</em><em> Advanced Learner’s Dictionary Third Edition</em> (2008) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press<em></em></p> <p>Many corpora these days run to millions of words. The <a href="http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/corpus/" target="_blank">British National Corpus</a> (BNC), for example, consists of 100 million words of English: a written part (90%) includes newspapers, magazines, journals, books, letters, memos, essays, etc and a spoken part (10%) includes conversations, recorded in a way that achieves a <a href="http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/demography?q=demographic" target="_blank">demographic</a> balance, as well as a range of spoken language from business or government meetings, radio shows, phone-ins, etc. These large collections of text are stored and read electronically, allowing researchers to employ a variety of software to reveal different patterns of language that exist within the corpus.</p> <p><span id="more-1058"></span></p> <p><strong>The example of CANBEC </strong></p> <p>CANBEC stands for the <a href="http://www.cambridge.org/gb/elt/catalogue/subject/custom/item3646597/Cambridge-International-Corpus-Cambridge-and-Nottingham-Spoken-Business-English-Corpus-%28CANBEC%29/?site_locale=en_GB" target="_blank">Cambridge and Nottingham Business English Corpus</a>. The project was established in the School of English Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK, and was developed together with Cambridge University Press. The CANBEC corpus consists of one million words of spoken data recorded in a variety of different businesses, from big multinational companies to small partnerships. Most of the data was obtained in the UK, but some was recorded in other countries which included a range of non-native speakers. The data covers <a href="http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/business-english/internal" target="_blank">internal</a> meetings, <a href="http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/business-english/external?q=external" target="_blank">external</a> meetings (involving two or more different companies), office talk, sales presentations, telephone conversations and general office <a href="http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/banter_1?q=banter" target="_blank">banter</a>. Meetings form the largest part of the corpus.</p> <p>The corpus was completed in 2003 and the data has enabled researchers to<em> </em>find out how real people speak and use English today in a work environment, how business language really works, how to teach it better and how to make language learning materials for business English. It has already been extensively used to inform materials produced by the Press in a range of teaching materials, grammars, dictionaries, course books and, most recently, the <a href="http://www.cambridge.org/gb/elt/catalogue/subject/project/pricing/isbn/item6595957/Cambridge-Business-English-Dictionary-Paperback/?site_locale=en_GB&currentProject=6595771" target="_blank">Cambridge Business English Dictionary</a>.</p> <p><strong>Single word frequency</strong></p> <p>A computerised corpus allows us to study lots of different things about the language. One of the most straightforward and revealing things it does is to generate lists of the most frequent words. Here is a list of the twenty most frequent single words from the CANBEC corpus.</p> <table border="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td valign="top" width="17"></td> <td valign="top" width="196"><strong>CANBEC</strong></td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="17">1</td> <td valign="top" width="196">we</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="17">2</td> <td valign="top" width="196">we’ve</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="17">3</td> <td valign="top" width="196">hmm</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="17">4</td> <td valign="top" width="196">customer</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="17">5</td> <td valign="top" width="196">we’re</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="17">6</td> <td valign="top" width="196">sales</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="17">7</td> <td valign="top" width="196">product</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="17">8</td> <td valign="top" width="196">orders</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="17">9</td> <td valign="top" width="196">need</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="17">10</td> <td valign="top" width="196">customers</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="17">11</td> <td valign="top" width="196">meeting</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="17">12</td> <td valign="top" width="196">order</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="17">13</td> <td valign="top" width="196">stock</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="17">14</td> <td valign="top" width="196">okay</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="17">15</td> <td valign="top" width="196">company</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="17">16</td> <td valign="top" width="196">marketing</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="17">17</td> <td valign="top" width="196">the</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="17">18</td> <td valign="top" width="196">business</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="17">19</td> <td valign="top" width="196">mail</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="17">20</td> <td valign="top" width="196">gonna</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p>It is interesting to note here how key content words (<strong>order</strong><em>, </em><strong>marketing</strong>) mix with markers of spoken <a href="http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/interaction?q=interaction" target="_blank">interaction</a> (<strong>ok</strong><em>, </em><strong>hmm</strong>) and that a computer reads singular and plural nouns as separate items.</p> <p>However, whilst knowing the frequency of single words can be useful, exploration of ‘chunks’ of language can be even more revealing. This will be discussed in more detail in the second part of this blog entry, along with an overview of ways in which analysis of corpora data can help inform language teaching and materials development.</p> <p>Some text for this blog has been extracted from: O’Keeffe, A., McCarthy, M. and Carter, R. (2007) <em>From Corpus to Classroom: Language use and language teaching. </em>Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. For further reading on CANBEC see Handford, M. (2011) <em>The Language of Business Meetings </em>Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.</p> <p>Prof. Ronald Carter, School of English Studies, University of Nottingham</p> <div class="sharedaddy sd-sharing-enabled"><div class="robots-nocontent sd-block sd-social sd-social-icon sd-sharing"><h3 class="sd-title">Share this:</h3><div class="sd-content"><ul><li class="share-facebook"><a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" data-shared="sharing-facebook-1058" class="share-facebook sd-button share-icon no-text" href="https://dictionaryblog.cambridge.org/2011/12/12/a-few-words-on-corpus-linguistics/?share=facebook" target="_blank" title="Click to share on Facebook" ><span></span><span class="sharing-screen-reader-text">Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)</span></a></li><li class="share-twitter"><a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" data-shared="sharing-twitter-1058" class="share-twitter sd-button share-icon no-text" href="https://dictionaryblog.cambridge.org/2011/12/12/a-few-words-on-corpus-linguistics/?share=twitter" target="_blank" title="Click to share on Twitter" ><span></span><span class="sharing-screen-reader-text">Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)</span></a></li><li class="share-reddit"><a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" data-shared="" class="share-reddit sd-button share-icon no-text" href="https://dictionaryblog.cambridge.org/2011/12/12/a-few-words-on-corpus-linguistics/?share=reddit" target="_blank" title="Click to share on Reddit" ><span></span><span class="sharing-screen-reader-text">Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)</span></a></li><li class="share-email"><a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" data-shared="" class="share-email sd-button share-icon no-text" href="mailto:?subject=%5BShared%20Post%5D%20A%20few%20words%20on%20corpus%20linguistics&body=https%3A%2F%2Fdictionaryblog.cambridge.org%2F2011%2F12%2F12%2Fa-few-words-on-corpus-linguistics%2F&share=email" target="_blank" title="Click to email a link to a friend" data-email-share-error-title="Do you have email set up?" data-email-share-error-text="If you're having problems sharing via email, you might not have email set up for your browser. 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<div class="comment-metadata"> <a href="https://dictionaryblog.cambridge.org/2011/12/12/a-few-words-on-corpus-linguistics/#comment-56510"> <time datetime="2016-08-27T05:05:22+01:00"> August 27, 2016 at 5:05 am </time> </a> <span class="reply"><a rel="nofollow" class="comment-reply-link" href="#comment-56510" data-commentid="56510" data-postid="1058" data-belowelement="div-comment-56510" data-respondelement="respond" data-replyto="Reply to unblocked games vevo running fred" aria-label="Reply to unblocked games vevo running fred">Reply</a></span> </div> </article> </li> <li class="pingback even thread-even depth-1" id="comment-130413"> <p>Pingback: <a href="https://getproficiency.wordpress.com/2020/02/17/new-words-17-february-2020-about-words-cambridge-dictionaries-online-blog/" class="url" rel="ugc external nofollow">New words – 17 February 2020 – About Words – Cambridge Dictionaries Online blog – Get Proficiency in English</a> </p> </li> <li id="comment-143909" class="comment odd alt 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Phrases that suddenly become popular." data-pin-nopin="true"/></a></div></div> </aside><aside id="authors-2" class="widget widget_authors"><h1 class="widget-title">Authors</h1><ul><li><a href="https://dictionaryblog.cambridge.org/author/aezrac/"> <img alt='1' src='https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/26f314c4585b5bdb9d749f149ee7f10b?s=48&d=identicon&r=g' srcset='https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/26f314c4585b5bdb9d749f149ee7f10b?s=96&d=identicon&r=g 2x' class='avatar avatar-48 photo' height='48' width='48' loading='lazy' decoding='async'/> <strong>Ron Carter</strong></a><ul><li><a href="https://dictionaryblog.cambridge.org/2011/12/14/a-few-words-on-corpus-linguistics-part-2/" title="A few words on corpus linguistics part 2">A few words on corpus linguistics part 2</a></li><li><a href="https://dictionaryblog.cambridge.org/2011/12/12/a-few-words-on-corpus-linguistics/" title="A few words on corpus linguistics">A few words on corpus linguistics</a></li></ul></li><li><a 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