COCA 5000 1 the Corpus of Contemporary American English
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COCA 5000 1 The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) 2012 Jun Updated 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 Mark Davies of Brigham Young University, and it is used by tens of thousands of users every month (linguists, teachers, translators, and other researchers). COCA is also related to other large corpora that we have created. The corpus contains more than 450 million words. [in 189,431 texts] and is equally divided among spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic texts. It includes 20 million words each year from 1990-2012 and the corpus is also updated regularly (the most recent texts are from Summer 2012). [The most recent addition of texts (Apr 2011 - Jun 2012) was completed in June 2012.] Because of its design, it is perhaps the only corpus of English that is suitable for looking at current, ongoing changes in the language (see the 2011 article in Literary and Linguistic Computing). For each year (and therefore overall, as well), the corpus is evenly divided between the five genres of spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic journals. The texts come from a variety of sources: Spoken: (95 million words [95,385,672]) Transcripts of unscripted conversation from more than 150 different TV and radio programs (examples: All Things Considered (NPR), Newshour (PBS), Good Morning America (ABC), Today Show (NBC), 60 Minutes (CBS), Hannity and Colmes (Fox), Jerry Springer, etc). [See notes on the naturalness and authenticity of the language from these transcripts). Fiction: (90 million words [90,344,134]) Short stories and plays from literary magazines, children’s magazines, popular magazines, first chapters of first edition books 1990-present, and movie scripts. Popular Magazines: (95 million words [95,564,706]) Nearly 100 different magazines, with a good mix (overall, and by year) between specific domains (news, health, home and gardening, women, financial, religion, sports, etc). A few examples are Time, Men’s Health, Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, Fortune, Christian Century, Sports Illustrated, etc. Newspapers: (92 million words [91,680,966]) Ten newspapers from across the US, including: USA Today, New York Times, Atlanta Journal Constitution, San Francisco Chronicle, etc. In most cases, there is a good mix between different sections of the newspaper, such as local news, opinion, sports, financial, etc. COCA 5000 2 Academic Journals: (91 million words [91,044,778]) Nearly 100 different peer-reviewed journals. These were selected to cover the entire range of the Library of Congress classification system (e.g. a certain percentage from B (philosophy, psychology, religion), D (world history), K (education), T (technology), etc.), both overall and by number of words per year YEAR SPOKEN FICTION MAGAZINE NEWSPAPER ACADEMIC TOTAL 1990 4,332,983 4,176,786 4,061,059 4,072,572 3,943,968 20,587,368 1991 4,275,641 4,152,690 4,170,022 4,075,636 4,011,142 20,685,131 1992 4,493,738 3,862,984 4,359,784 4,060,218 3,988,593 20,765,317 1993 4,449,330 3,936,880 4,318,256 4,117,294 4,109,914 20,931,674 1994 4,416,223 4,128,691 4,360,184 4,116,061 4,008,481 21,029,640 1995 4,506,463 3,925,121 4,355,396 4,086,909 3,978,437 20,852,326 1996 4,060,792 3,938,742 4,348,339 4,062,397 4,070,075 20,480,345 1997 3,874,976 3,750,256 4,330,117 4,114,733 4,378,426 20,448,508 1998 4,424,874 3,754,334 4,353,187 4,096,829 4,070,949 20,700,173 1999 4,417,997 4,130,984 4,353,229 4,079,926 3,983,704 20,965,840 2000 4,414,772 3,925,331 4,353,049 4,034,817 4,053,691 20,781,660 2001 3,987,514 3,869,790 4,262,503 4,066,589 3,924,911 20,111,307 2002 4,329,856 3,745,852 4,279,955 4,085,554 4,014,495 20,455,712 2003 4,404,978 4,094,865 4,295,543 4,022,457 4,007,927 20,825,770 2004 4,330,018 4,076,462 4,300,735 4,084,584 3,974,453 20,766,252 2005 4,396,030 4,075,210 4,328,642 4,089,168 3,890,318 20,779,368 2006 4,304,513 4,081,287 4,279,043 4,085,757 4,028,620 20,779,220 2007 3,882,586 4,028,998 4,185,161 3,975,474 4,267,452 20,339,671 2008 3,635,622 4,155,298 4,205,477 4,031,769 4,015,545 20,043,711 2009 3,969,587 4,143,814 3,855,815 3,971,607 4,144,064 20,084,887 2010 4,095,393 3,929,160 3,806,011 4,258,633 3,816,420 19,905,617 2011 4,033,627 4,166,029 4,199,378 3,982,299 4,064,535 20,445,868 2012 2,348,159 2,294,570 2,203,821 2,109,683 2,298,658 11,254,891* TOTAL 95,385,672 90,344,134 95,564,706 91,680,966 91,044,778 464,020,256 * The latest update for 2012 was in Summer 2012, and includes texts from Jan-Jun 2012. Retrieved January 12, 2013, from http://www.wordfrequency.info COCA 5000 3 COCA Compared with Other Corpuses The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) offers a balance of availability, size, genres, and currency (how recent it is) that is not found in other corpora, including the American National Corpus (ANC), the British National Corpus (BNC), the Bank of English (BOE), or the Oxford English Corpus (OEC). In addition, the architecture used for COCA (and the other corpora from corpus.byu.edu) is among the most powerful architectures available for online corpora -- at least as scalable and feature-rich as Corpus Workbench (including its incarnation in Sketch Engine and BNCweb), as well as other architectures like VISL and PIE (more information...). The chart below provides a summary of the features of the different corpora, and detailed discussions can be found via the links at the top of each column. Feature COCA BNC ANC BOE OEC Availability Free / web Free / web Free $1150 year (Limited) 1 Size (millions of words) 450 100 22 455 1,898 Time span 1990-2012 1970s-1993 2000-2005 ?2 1970s-2005 2000-2006 Number of words of text being 20 million 0 0 0 0 added each year Can be used as a monitor corpus to Yes No No (Limited) (Limited) see ongoing changes in English Wide range of genres: spoken, fiction, popular magazine, Yes Yes No (Yes) (Yes) newspaper, academic Size of spoken (millions of words) 90 10 4 62 82 Spoken = conversational, (Mostly: Yes Yes (Some) (Some) unscripted ? notes) Dialect American British American Br / Am + Am / Br + Interface BYU BYU Open ANC Sketch Engine Sketch Engine Sketch Engine (DVD) BNCweb VISL PIE Notes: 1. The OEC is generally available only to researchers at Oxford University Press, although access is occasionally given to selected researchers outside of the OUP. 2. In 2005 the corpus had 22 million words, and the current site still mentions 22 million COCA 5000 4 words, but some people have claimed that new texts have been added since 2005. We'd appreciate details from anyone who knows about the status on this. Retrieved January 11, 2013, from http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ COCA Compared with BNC Overall, the wordlists from the British National Corpus (list 1 / list 2) are quite good. However, because there are some important differences between COCA and the BNC in terms of size and how recent the corpora are, and so the BNC may not be as accurate for low-frequency words and for new words in the language. Note also that the wordlists from the BNC (list 1 / list 2) do not provide anything beyond the bare wordlist -- no collocates, no synonyms, etc -- and therefore no indication of the meaning and use of the words. Overall, for the top 5,000 words there is about a 10% difference between the the COCA and the BNC wordlists (see explanation of methodology below), beyond spelling differences (favo(u)rite, program(me), categori[s/z]e, etc). Things get somewhat more problematic at lower levels, where the BNC lists diverge 30-35% from what is found in the COCA lists. Some differences in the wordlists are related to culture, society, politics, or current events (e.g. Am Republican, congressional, baseball, Iraqi; Br Tory, parliamentary, Victorian), some are just different words for the "same" concept (e.g. store/shop, attorney/solicitor, apartment/flat, mom/mum), and some words in COCA (1990-2010) refer to things that are too new to have made it into the pre-1993 BNC (e.g. web, Internet, high-tech, online). +American (COCA) / -British (BNC) The following are just a sampling of the words that are much more common in COCA than in the BNC. In all cases, the word is at least twice as far down the list in the BNC wordlist as in COCA (e.g. #2000 in COCA, #5000 in BNC). Verb: call, report, focus, guess, sign, step, figure, roll, fire, hire, file, oppose, wrap, interview, accomplish, testify, bake, track, evolve, violate, target, pitch, flip, ruin, hike, invade Noun: student, president, percent, kid, guy, nation, photo, arm, American, Republican, phone, movie, store, lawyer, Democrat, professor, expert, senator, break, camera, coach, item, mom, dream, attorney, scientist, web, camp, truck, apartment, bowl, baseball, internet, basketball COCA 5000 5 Adjective: American, federal, tough, native, Iraqi, crazy, smart, Israeli, Mexican, congressional, elementary, online, gifted, athletic, ongoing, African-american, suburban, Hispanic, scary, high-tech, cute, nonprofit, immigrant, skeptical, aging, low-income, interstate +British (BNC) / -American (COCA) The following are just a sampling of the words that are much more common in the BNC than in COCA.