The ICE project and world Englishes

Abstract

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.

A corpus‐based approach to Chinese English lexis

“…At 1.9 billion words in total (each individual component ranging from 35 to 387 million words), GloWbE does not artificially eliminate 'non-standard' linguistic features as tends to be done in ICE (Mair, 2015), thus reflecting 'the less generically constrained frontiers of the local variety' (2015, p.41) and representing a more comprehensive picture of the complex ecology of language use in the variety. ICE corpora, on the other hand, at one million words each and carefully curated (Greenbaum, 1991;Nelson, 2017) upon textual data from 60% spoken material and 40% written material. Chinese English words are localized lexical innovations characteristic of the Chinese English variety, most of which are emerging lexical features composed of multi-word units in the medium and low frequency band (see Qin & Gao, 2020), thus generally constituting a research area sensitive to the parameter of size; their source dataset, the CED mainly sampled Chinese English instances from online publications from 2014 onwards (see Qin & Gao, 2020 for a list of the data sources).…”

“…At 1.9 billion words in total (each individual component ranging from 35 to 387 million words), GloWbE does not artificially eliminate ‘non‐standard’ linguistic features as tends to be done in ICE (Mair, 2015), thus reflecting ‘the less generically constrained frontiers of the local variety’ (2015, p.41) and representing a more comprehensive picture of the complex ecology of language use in the variety. ICE corpora, on the other hand, at one million words each and carefully curated (Greenbaum, 1991; Nelson, 2017), ‘sometimes do not provide enough data for in‐depth research on lexical variation’ (Davies & Fuchs, 2015b, p. 2), and ‘are very limited for … “rare” linguistic phenomena’ (Nelson, 2015, p. 38). In terms of time frame, GloWbE includes texts from 2012 to 2013 while ICE records language data from the 1990s.…”

The International Corpus of English project: A progress report

“…NOTES 1 Since this article was drafted, World Englishes 36 (3) has appeared, with several papers on ICE, touching on some similar points, notably in Edwards (2017), Gut and Fuchs (2017), Kirk (2017), Loureiro-Porto (2017), with an introductory overview by Nelson (2017) himself. 2 Early references to ICE are Greenbaum (1988Greenbaum ( , 1990aGreenbaum ( , 1990bGreenbaum ( , 1990cGreenbaum ( , 1991aGreenbaum ( , 1991bGreenbaum ( , 1992Greenbaum ( , 1992Greenbaum ( , 1993Greenbaum ( , 1994Greenbaum ( , 1996aGreenbaum ( , 1996bNelson, 1991Nelson, , 1995Nelson, , 1996Nelson, , 2002aNelson, , 2002b.…”

“…Since this article was drafted, World Englishes 36(3) has appeared, with several papers on ICE, touching on some similar points, notably in Edwards (), Gut and Fuchs (), Kirk (), Loureiro‐Porto (), with an introductory overview by Nelson () himself.…”