Response to Davies and Fuchs

Abstract

In the short time that it has been available, I have become a regular user of the Global Web-based English Corpus (GloWbE), and I have encouraged students and young researchers to use it, too. GloWbE is a great new resource, and Mark Davies is to be thanked for making it widely and generously available to a global community of linguists and students of the English language, many among whom will be speakers of the varieties of English documented. Mark and Robert's paper offers a useful summary of the corpus design and architecture and presents a wide range of case studies illustrating the potential of the new resource. I have found the case studies convincing in themselves and also capable of inspiring numerous similar projects. What I find encouraging for future work is that Mark and Robert use GloWbE to replicate numerous studies carried out on small corpora, thus proving the robust reliability of the new resource before they move on to use it in order to explore less well-charted territory. The researcher using GloWbE as a stand-alone corpus to investigate mid-and low-frequency phenomena in World Englishes can thus rest assured that, data-wise, they stand on firm ground. Most grammatical constructions and lexicogrammatical variables distinguishing varieties of English are in this frequency band, and currently only GloWbE provides the amount of data and the convenient and powerful search interface needed for systematic comparison across varieties. "Expanding Horizons" indeed.Against the background of this generally very favourable assessment, and in fulfilment of my role as a constructively critical commentator, I may be permitted to raise a number of points which remain to be addressed.

ICE vs GloWbE: Big data and corpus compilation

“…However, the same search in the spoken component of several ICE corpora showed that the frequency of these items was much higher in this corpus than in GloWbE. Hence, the working hypothesis has been that, though blogs are partly oral and informal, there is no substitute for actual conversation (as implied by Mair : 30–1 and Peters : 42).…”

The International Corpus of English project: A progress report

“…Perhaps the most major change of contents for second generation corpora is the recommendation for the inclusion of a new component of electronic texts, totalling up to 500,000 words, making the total maximum size of a second generation corpus 1.5 million words. Indeed, from her thorough comprehensive comparison between ICE and the GloWbE corpus of blogs and websites (Davies, ), Loureiro‐Porto (, p. 468) concludes that ‘the future of ICE should include web registers alongside the text types included so far’; from other comparisons, similar conclusions are drawn by Mair (), Mukherjee (), Nelson () and Peters (), in their responses to Davies and Fuchs (). A list of possible electronic texts is presented in Appendix 3 for discussion.…”

“…Outer Circle varieties, their differences from standard English no longer to be regarded as substratally deviant but rather as lexifications from local pidgins and creoles in a multilingual community where the use of English(es) is but a sociolinguistically-significant choice among competing languages (Mair, 2013(Mair, , 2015. How far are speakers in an Outer…”

“…Exactly how second generation ICE corpora should reflect English in Outer Circle countries has thus become a much more challenging issue. Besides, in a study of ‘the use of pidgins and creoles in web forums serving West African and Caribbean diasporas’ (Mair, , p. 253), much more is known about Outer Circle varieties, their differences from standard English no longer to be regarded as substratally deviant but rather as lexifications from local pidgins and creoles in a multilingual community where the use of English(es) is but a sociolinguistically‐significant choice among competing languages (Mair, , ). How far are speakers in an Outer Circle ICE‐corpus speakers of an acrolectal variety approximating to the standardized language (as envisaged at the outset of ICE) or rather simply a local mesolectal or basilectal/pidgin variety (Deuber, ; Mukherjee, ) mindful that local standardization may not have taken place (Schneider, )?…”

A multidimensional study of interactive registers in Pakistani and US English

“…The availability of the Global Web‐based English Corpus (GloWbE) derived from blogs and general web sites (Davies & Fuchs, ) is indeed a welcome development in this regard. However, there are also a number of problems associated with this type of big data corpus, as noted by Nelson (), Mukherjee (), and Mair (). We therefore concur with Loureiro‐Porto () that there is a need for carefully compiled traditional‐type corpora of interactive online registers either as independent datasets or as extensions of existing corpora like ICE, which, in addition to blogs, also include other registers like those studied in this research paper.…”