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:
“As they are not seen on their way down the streams, it is thought by fishermen that they never return, but waste away and die, clinging to rocks and stumps of trees for an indefinite period; a tragic feature in the scenery of the river bottoms worthy to be remembered with Shakespeare’s description of the sea-floor.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Everything to which we concede existence is a posit from the standpoint of a description of the theory-building process, and simultaneously real from the standpoint of the theory that is being built. Nor let us look down on the standpoint of the theory as make-believe; for we can never do better than occupy the standpoint of some theory or other, the best we can muster at the time.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)