The 400 million word Corpus of Historical American English (1810–2009)

Mark Davies | Brigham Young University

The 400 million word Corpus of Historical American English (1810–2009) provides researchers with an extremely robust set of data for Late Modern English. The corpus is composed of fiction, magazines, newspapers, and nonfiction books, and its genre balance stays roughly the same from decade to decade. Because of its size and its advanced architecture and interface, it allows researchers to look at an extremely wide range of changes – many of which would not be possible with a small 2–4 million word corpus. These include the frequency of any word or phrase by decade and mass comparison of all words in different periods (to examine lexical changes), morphological shifts (via wildcards and pattern matching), syntactic shifts (due to very accurate lemmatization and part of speech tagging), and semantic change (by comparing collocates over time, as well as searches that use data from the integrated thesaurus and customized word lists).

Published online: 13 November 2012
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.325.11dav

Cited by

Cited by other publications

Anderwald, Lieselotte

2014. In Contact, Variation, and Change in the History of English [Studies in Language Companion Series, 159], ► pp. 113 ff.

Lin, Zefeng, Xiaojun Wan & Zongming Guo

2019. In Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 11838], ► pp. 749 ff.

Vartiainen, Turo & Mikko Höglund

2020. How to make new use of existing resources: Tracing the history and geographical variation of off of. American Speech ► pp. 1 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 14 october 2020. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.