1. BYU COCA: CORPUS OF CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN ENGLISH
Workshop
Purdue University
November 2015

2. Agenda
Essential background: COCA, other BYU corpora, basics of the interface
Search functions: information & practice
Search syntax: information & practice
Results analysis
Activities
(Possibly: Pedagogical uses)

3. COCA: Overview (1 & 2)
“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. “ (COCA website)
Corpus: a database of texts that you can query
Text types (registers) in COCA: spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic (page 2)
Timeframe of COCA collection:
Let’s look at text types here

4. COCA and other corpora (3)
Wikipedia Corpus
Global Web-based English (the power to compare across dialects, e.g. US/UK)
Corpus of Historical American English (CoHA) ( texts from )
Time Magazine
British National Corpus (BNC)
It is important to underline:
- These corpora share the interface and fucntions. Once you become fluent in using one corpus you will be able to use another one.
Question: What might a researcher who is looking up of the same words and phrases in:
Wikipedia and Globwe
COCA and BNC
CoHA & COCA
be looking for exactly?

5. COCA Interface: Welcome Screen
Interface consists of 3 active & independent frames

6. COCA Interface: Results Display

7. COCA Interface: How to search?
Display: List, Chart, KWIC, Compare
Search String (clicking on the word “collocates” turns off and on the function; the same with POS)
Sections:
Registers (Spoken, Fiction, Magazine, Newspaper, Academic)
Time of publication
Subregisters:
MAG: Sci/Tech; FIC:Juvenile
Click and scroll time (click on Collocates, POS List, Section Scroll)

8. Corpus: What to search for?
Cheat Sheet
words
mysterious
phrases
nooks and crannies or faint + noun
lemmas
all forms of words, like sing or tall
wildcards
un*ly or r?n*
complex searches
such as un-X-ed adjectives or verb + any word + a form of ground.

9. COCA Interface: What are tags?
phrases
faint + noun
faint [nn*]
Tags can be easily checked in the POS list
Add a space between the word and the tag
TAGS system: CLAW 7
Tags are ascribed by the automated tagger (there are some that are wrong, but it is a small margin)
Let’s check the tags for
singular nouns
wh- adverbs (who, when, where, how)

10. Activities time!

11. Activity 3
FREQ: tokens
Per milion: shows proportion of tokens in the corpus

12. Activity 4.

13. Activity 5. Collocates delimiting function.
= Search any (*) noun collocates of the word laugh (in the role of a noun) 5 spaces before or after the word laugh.
“Crystal threw back her head and laughed, a throaty little laugh of sheer exuberance with a sort of purr in it. In a moment he”
LEFT node
RIGHT node
and
laughed a
throaty
little
laugh of
sheer
exuberance
with 5 4 3 2 1

14. Activity 6. KWIC: looking at research prepositions.

15. Pedagogical applications of corpora:
Words and Phrase Analysis

16. THANK YOU!