The Written British National Corpus 2014: Design, compilation and analysis Abi Hawtin ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science Department of Linguistics and English Language Lancaster University A thesis submitted to Lancaster University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics December 2018 Table of Contents Table of Contents .......................................................................................................i Declaration ............................................................................................................... vi Abstract ................................................................................................................. viii List of Tables............................................................................................................ xi List of Figures .........................................................................................................xii List of Appendices ................................................................................................ xiii Acknowledgements ................................................................................................ xiv Chapter 1: Introduction ........................................................................................... 1 1.1 The British National Corpus 2014 .................................................................... 1 1.2 Distinguishing between spoken and written language ....................................... 3 1.3 Justifying the Written BNC2014 project ........................................................... 5 1.3.1 Introduction ................................................................................................ 5 1.3.2 The British National Corpus (BNC1994) .................................................... 6 1.3.3 The enduring popularity of the BNC1994.................................................... 9 1.3.4 Other corpora of written British English .................................................... 14 1.3.4.1 The Brown Family ............................................................................. 15 1.3.4.2 The Bank of English ........................................................................... 18 1.3.4.3 ukWaC .............................................................................................. 19 1.3.4.4 ICE-GB ............................................................................................ 20 1.3.5 Summary and justification for the project .................................................. 21 1.4 The project team and my ownership of the research ........................................ 22 1.4.1 The Written BNC2014 project team ......................................................... 22 1.4.2 Ownership of research .............................................................................. 22 1.5 Copyright and Permissions ............................................................................. 24 1.5.1 Introduction ............................................................................................. 24 1.5.2 Copyright law .......................................................................................... 25 1.5.3 Expert opinions ........................................................................................ 28 1.5.4 Definitions ............................................................................................... 29 1.5.5 Conclusion ............................................................................................... 29 1.6 Research aims and the structure of the thesis .................................................. 30 Chapter 2: Contemporary National Corpora ....................................................... 35 2.1 Introduction .................................................................................................... 35 i 2.2 The Corpus de référence du français contemporain (CRFC) ........................... 36 2.3 The Czech National Corpus (SYN2015) ......................................................... 41 2.4 The Thai National Corpus (TNC) ................................................................... 44 2.5 The American National Corpus (ANC) ........................................................... 47 2.6 Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) ..................................... 50 2.7 Deutsches Referenzkorpus (DeReKo) ............................................................. 52 2.8 Conclusion ..................................................................................................... 54 Chapter 3: Creating Representative and Comparable Corpora .......................... 57 3.1 Introduction .................................................................................................... 57 3.2 Corpus Representativeness ............................................................................. 57 3.2.1 Defining representativeness ...................................................................... 58 3.2.2 Sampling .................................................................................................. 59 3.2.2.1 Population definition ......................................................................... 59 3.2.2.2 Random sampling .............................................................................. 62 3.2.2.3 Proportional sampling ....................................................................... 64 3.2.2.4 Balance ............................................................................................ 67 3.2.2.5 Sample size ........................................................................................ 67 3.2.2.6 Number of samples ............................................................................ 69 3.2.2.7 Corpus size ........................................................................................ 70 3.2.3 Representativeness is not possible ............................................................. 72 3.2.4 The BNC1994 ........................................................................................... 75 3.2.5 Conclusion ................................................................................................ 76 3.3. Comparability in corpus design ..................................................................... 77 3.3.1 Introduction .............................................................................................. 77 3.3.2. Methods for creating and testing comparable corpora ............................... 80 3.3.2.1 Creating comparable corpora using web crawling ............................ 80 3.3.2.2 Testing corpus comparability ............................................................. 84 3.3.3 The Brown Family .................................................................................... 86 3.3.4 ARCHER ................................................................................................. 92 3.3.5 Conclusion ................................................................................................ 94 3.4. Representativeness vs. Comparability ............................................................ 95 3.4.1 The Problem ............................................................................................. 95 3.4.2 The Solution ............................................................................................. 98 Chapter 4: Designing the Written BNC2014 Sampling Frame ........................... 100 4.1 Introduction .................................................................................................. 100 ii 4.2 Classifying texts in corpora .......................................................................... 100 4.2.1 Introduction ........................................................................................... 100 4.2.2 Genre Theory ......................................................................................... 101 4.2.2.1 Introduction ..................................................................................... 101 4.2.2.2 Approaches to genre ........................................................................ 101 4.2.3 Genre, register, style, text type – some definitions .................................. 103 4.2.3.1 Introduction .................................................................................... 103 4.2.3.2 Genre .............................................................................................. 104 4.2.3.3 Register .......................................................................................... 105 4.2.3.4 Style ................................................................................................ 106 4.2.3.5 Text type .......................................................................................... 107 4.2.3.6 Terminology in this thesis ................................................................ 107 4.2.4 Text classification in previous national corpora ...................................... 108 4.2.4.1 The Brown Family ........................................................................... 108 4.2.4.2 The Corpus de référence du Français contemporain (CRFC) .......... 110 4.2.4.3 The British National Corpus 1994 ................................................... 112 4.2.4.4 Summary ........................................................................................ 115 4.2.5 Text classification in the Written BNC2014 ........................................... 115 4.3 Design of the sampling frame