Corpus Design

Question 1

Types of corpora

Answer 1

1. Specialized corpus – e.g.
   • genre: the language of newspapers
   • time: 2005 to the present day
   • place: just texts published in Germany
2. General/Reference corpus – needs to be much larger. e.g.
   • The British National Corpus (BNC) has about 100 million words of
   • spoken and written British English
3. Multilingual (comparable) corpus – e.g.
   • English and German – texts of same genre/register/topics etc. GeCCO corpus.
4. Parallel corpus – e.g.
   • English and German – exactly the same texts translated. E.g. the GeCCO corpus.
5. Learner corpus – • language use created by people learning a particular language. E.g. the International
   Corpus of Learner English.
6. Historical or Diachronic corpus – e.g.
   • Helsinki corpus – 1.5 million words of texts from 700AD to 1700AD.
   • RSC corpus – 100 million words of texts from scientific English 1665-1996
7. Monitor corpus – continually being added to, e.g.
   • the Bank of English.
   • DEREKO corpus (German)