Now that I have been working with my classmates on the BNC, I think it is time to write a little article about this language resource. According to the BNC website:
“The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of current British English, both spoken and written. […] The written part of the BNC (90%) includes, for example, extracts from regional and national newspapers, specialist periodicals and journals for all ages and interests, academic books and popular fiction, published and unpublished letters and memoranda, school and university essays, among many other kinds of text. The spoken part (10%) consists of orthographic transcriptions of unscripted informal conversations (recorded by volunteers selected from different age, region and social classes in a demographically balanced way) and spoken language collected in different contexts, ranging from formal business or government meetings to radio shows and phone-ins.”
BNC main page
Source:
Quote: (2009, June 13) From [bnc] British National Corpus. Retrieved 18:13. June 13, 2009. From BNC.
