Description
The BNC is a monolingual corpus as it records samples of language use in British English only, although occasionally words and phrases from other languages may also be present. It is a synchronic corpus as only language use from the late 20th century is represented; the BNC is not meant to be a historical record of the development of British English over the ages. From the beginning, those involved in the gathering of written data sought to make the BNC a balanced corpus and hence looked for data in various mediums.
Read more about this topic: British National Corpus
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