Corpus of Contemporary American English - Queries

Queries

• The interface is the same as the BYU-BNC interface for the 100 million word British National Corpus, the 100 million word TIME Magazine corpus, and the 400 million word Corpus of *Historical* American English (COHA), 1810s–2000s (see links below)

• Queries by word, phrase, alternates, substring, part of speech, lemma, synonyms (see below), and customized lists (see below)

• The corpus is tagged by CLAWS, the same tagger that was used for the BNC and the TIME corpus

• Chart listings (totals for all matching forms in each genre or year, 1990–present, as well as for sub-genres) and table listings (frequency for each matching form in each genre or year)

• Full collocates searching (up to ten words left and right of node word)

• Re-sortable concordances, showing the most common words/strings to the left and right of the searched word

• Comparisons between genres or time periods (e.g. collocates of 'chair' in fiction or academic, nouns with 'break the ' in newspapers or academic, adjectives that occur primarily in sports magazines, or verbs that are more common 2005–2010 than previously)

• One-step comparisons of collocates of related words, to study semantic or cultural differences between words (e.g. comparison of collocates of 'small' and 'little', or 'Democrats' and 'Republicans', or 'men' and 'women', or 'rob' vs 'steal')

• Users can include semantic information from a 60,000 entry thesaurus directly as part of the query syntax (e.g. frequency and distribution of synonyms of 'beautiful', synonyms of 'strong' occurring in fiction but not academic, synonyms of 'clean' + noun ('clean the floor', 'washed the dishes')

• Users can also create their own own 'customized' word lists, and then re-use these as part of subsequent queries (e.g. lists related to a particular semantic category (clothes, foods, emotions), or a user-defined part of speech)

• Note that the corpus is only available through the web interface, due to copyright restrictions.