Response to Davies and Fuchs

ICE and GloWbE are the two main corpora available for the study of world Englishes, and as such they share several features. However, they also differ in a number of respects owing to the different techniques adopted during compilation: while ICE is a traditional corpus with 32 text types represented, GloWbE only contains material from the Internet. This article compares the two corpora from a number of perspectives: (i) frequency and collocation of modal verbs of necessity, (ii) degree of orality and informality of the blogs included in GloWbE versus the spoken component of ICE; and (iii) the vernacular and globalised nature of both corpora. Findings show that big data cannot be considered as an alternative source to corpus compilation. Rather, the new text type(s) found in Internet material should be included in traditional corpora.

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Modals Of Necessity: Collocations and Frequencymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Modals Of Necessity: Collocations and Frequencymentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

ICE vs GloWbE: Big data and corpus compilation

Loureiro‐Porto

2017

“…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.…”

Section: Second Generation Corporamentioning

confidence: 79%

The International Corpus of English project: A progress report

Kirk

Nelson

2018

Self Cite

This article begins by introducing the International Corpus of English project and proceeds to summarize the findings and outcomes of an extensive review by written questionnaire conducted by the present authors (Kirk & Nelson, 2017). Although critically concerned with practice hitherto, the review also discusses possible second generation components, and the issues in need of addressing before they should begin. The report contains many comments from a questionnaire that respondents complete, giving a flavour of the importance with which the corpus is valued. Respondents also raise a number of fundamental questions about the nature of L2 varieties of English in multilingual contexts. An Appendix sets out a prospectus for a possible component of electronic texts. Other Appendices list the corpus's text categories and their quantities as well as the 27 national components and their directors.

“…Of course, English as used on the Internet is becoming increasingly important and influential, so we must welcome the GloWbE corpus as a means of examining its characteristics. We should not, however, rush to the conclusion that bigger is necessarily better in all areas of linguistic enquiry (Nelson ).…”

mentioning

confidence: 97%

The ICE project and world Englishes

Nelson

2017

Self Cite

The articles in this symposium were first presented at a workshop in Trier, Germany, in 2015. The workshop title was ‘The future of the International Corpus of English (ICE): New challenges, new developments’. This introductory article looks back over the last twenty‐five years of the ICE project, and considers some of the issues that have emerged in that period in relation to corpus compilation and the analysis of world Englishes. Among those issues are the unprecedented advances in computer technology, and also the changing perceptions of English as a world language.