Description of the corpora. As mentioned in the introductory section, the present analysis includes material from two corpora, the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is the largest freely-available corpus of English, and the only large and balanced corpus of American English. The corpus was created by Xxxx Xxxxxx of Xxxxxxx Xxxxx University and contains more than 450 million words of text. It has a collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources. The Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE) is composed of 1.9 billion words from 1.8 million web pages in 20 different English-speaking countries. This corpus was also created by Xxxx Xxxxxx of Xxxxxxx Xxxxx University, and it was released in 2013. We used the Corpus of Global Web- Based English (GloWbE) for the comparison between AmE and BrE, since it gives us the possibility to search words from various regional and national sources like newspapers and books. The Corpus of American English (COCA), which we used for the comparison between written and spoken American English, allowed us to limit our searches by frequency and to compare the frequency of words between spoken and written AmE. The written part of the corpus consists of texts from regional newspapers, academic books and popular fiction and the spoken part consists of transcriptions of unscripted informal conversations and spoken language collected in different contexts, such as radio or television shows.
Appears in 8 contracts
Samples: Number Agreement, Number Agreement, Number Agreement
