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
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“A sound mind in a sound body, is a short, but full description of a happy state in this World: he that has these two, has little more to wish for; and he that wants either of them, will be little the better for anything else.”
—John Locke (1632–1704)
“The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“He hath achieved a maid
That paragons description and wild fame;
One that excels the quirks of blazoning pens.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)