The 385 million word Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, 2009)

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1、The385+millionwordCorpusofContemporaryAmericanEnglish(1990–2008+)Design,architecture,andlinguisticinsightsMarkDaviesBrighamYoungUniversityTheCorpusofContemporaryAmericanEnglish(COCA),whichwasreleasedonlineinearly2008,isthefirstlargeanddiversecorpusofA

2、mericanEnglish.Inthispaper,wefirstdiscussthedesignofthecorpus—whichcontainsmorethan385millionwordsfrom1990–2008(20millionwordseachyear),balancedbe-tweenspoken,fiction,popularmagazines,newspapers,andacademicjournals.Wealsodiscusstheuniquerelationaldata

3、basesarchitecture,whichallowsforawiderangeofqueriesthatarenotavailable(orarequitedifficult)withotherarchitecturesandinterfaces.Toconclude,weconsiderinsightsfromthecorpusonanumberofcasesofgenre-basedvariationandrecentlinguisticvariation,includinganexte

4、ndedanalysisofphrasalverbsincontemporaryAmericanEnglish.Keywords:corpus,AmericanEnglish,relationaldatabases,diachronic,genres,phrasalverbs1.IntroductionTheBritishNationalCorpushasbeenthesourceformanycorpus-relatedstudiessinceitsreleaseintheearly1990s—

5、perhapsmorethananyothercorpusofEng-lishduringthissameperiod.Asvaluableasitis,however,theBNCisbeginningtoshowitsageinsomerespects.First,therehavenotbeenanysubstantiveadditionstothetextualcorpussinceitwasreleasedin1993,althoughsometextshavebeencorrected

6、duringthistime.Second,thereisnoplannedexpansiontotheBNCinthefuture,whichmeansthatitwillunfortunatelybecomeincreasinglyoutofdatewithregardstorecentchangesinEnglish.(Tobefair,though,theBNCwasneverconceivedofas,orpromisedtobe,amonitorcorpus.)Finally,alth

7、oughthe100millionwordcorpuswasextremelylargeforitstime(theearly1990s),withInternationalJournalofCorpusLinguistics14:2(2009),159–190.doi10.1075/ijcl.14.2.02davissn1384–6655/e-issn1569–9811©JohnBenjaminsPublishingCompany160MarkDaviescurrenttechnologyiti

8、spossibletocreatemuchlargercorpora,whichwouldpos-siblybeofevenmorevaluetoresearchers.SincetheBNCwasreleasedmorethanfifteenyearsago,researchershaveenvi-sionedsomethingsimilarforAmericanEnglish,aswellasothervarietiesofEng-lish.Inthelate1990s,wor