The TV and Movies corpora
Design, construction, and use
Mark Davies | Brigham Young University
This paper discusses the creation and use of the TV Corpus (subtitles from 75,000 episodes, 325 million words, 6
English-speaking countries, 1950s-2010s) and the Movies Corpus (subtitles from 25,000 movies, 250 million words, 6 English-speaking
countries, 1930s–2010s), which are available at English-Corpora.org. The corpora compare
well to the BNC-Conversation data in terms of informality, lexis, phraseology, and syntax. But at 525 million words in total size, they are
more than fifty times as large as BNC-Conversation (both BNC1994 and BNC2014 combined), which means that they can be used to look at a wide
range of linguistic phenomena. The TV and Movies corpora also allow useful comparisons of very informal language across time (containing
texts from the 1930s and later for the movies, and from the 1950s onwards for TV shows) and between dialects of English (such as British and
American English).
Keywords: TV, movies, diachronic, dialects, speech
References
References
Baker, P.
(2009) The BE06 corpus of British English and recent language change. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 14(3), 312–337. 
(2011) Times may change but we’ll always have money: A corpus driven examination of vocabulary change in four diachronic corpora. Journal of English Linguistics, 39(1), 65–88.
Bednarek, M.
(2018) Language and Television Series: A Linguistic Approach to TV Dialogue. Cambridge University Press.
(2019) Creating Dialogue for TV: Screenwriters Talk Television. Routledge.
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E.
(1999) Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Longman.
BNC Consortium
Brysbaert, M., & New, B.
(2009) Moving beyond Kučera and Francis: A critical evaluation of current word frequency norms and the introduction of a new and improved word frequency measure for American English. Behavior Research Methods, 41(4), 977–990.
Brysbaert, M., Mandera, P., & Keuleers, E.
(2018) The word frequency effect in word processing: An updated review. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 27(1), 45–50.
Canavan, A., & Zipperlen, G.
(1996) CALLFRIEND American English-Non-Southern Dialect (LDC96S46). Linguistic Data Consortium.
Canavan, A., Graff, D., & Zipperlen, G.
(1997) CALLHOME American English Speech (LDC97S42). Linguistic Data Consortium.
Davies, M.
(2009) the 385+ million word Corpus of Contemporary American English (1990–2008+): Design, architecture, and linguistic insights. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 14(2), 159–190.
(2011) The Corpus of Contemporary American English as the first reliable monitor corpus of English. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 25(4), 447–465.
(2012) Expanding horizons in historical linguistics with the 400 million word Corpus of Historical American English. Corpora, 7(2), 121–157.
(2015) Corpora: An introduction. In D. Biber & R. Reppen (Eds.), Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics (pp. 11–31). Cambridge University Press.
(2017) Using large online corpora to examine lexical, semantic, and cultural variation in different dialects and time periods. In E. Friginal (Ed.), Studies in Corpus-Based Sociolinguistics (pp. 19–82). Routledge.
(2018) Corpus-based studies of lexical and semantic variation: The importance of both corpus size and corpus design. In C. Suhr, T. Nevalainen & I. Taavitsainen (Eds.), From Data to Evidence in English Language Research (pp. 34–55). Brill.
Forchini, P.
(2012) Movie Language Revisited: Evidence from Multi-Dimensional Analysis and Corpora. Peter Lang.
Greenbaum, S.
(1996) Comparing English Worldwide: The International Corpus of English. Clarendon Press.
Godfrey, J. J., & Holliman, E.
(1993) Switchboard-1 Release 2 LDC97S62. Linguistic Data Consortium. https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC97S62
Van Heuven, W., Mandera, P., Keuleers, E., & Brysbaert, M.
(2014) SUBTLEX-UK: A new and improved word frequency database for British English. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 67(6), 1176–1190.
Levshina, N.
(2017) Online film subtitles as a corpus: An n-gram approach. Corpora, 12(3), 311–338.
Lison, P., & Tiedemann, J.
(2016) OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting large parallel corpora from movie and TV subtitles. In N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, T. Declerck, S. Goggi, M. Grobelnik, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, H. Mazo, A. Moreno, J. Odijk, & S. Piperidis (Eds.), Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’16). European Language Resources Association (ELRA). https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/L16-1147/
Love, R., Dembry, C., Hardie, A., Brezina, V., & McEnery, T.
(2017) The Spoken BNC2014: Designing and building a spoken corpus of everyday conversations. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 22(3), 319–344.
Lugea, J.
(2019) The intralingual subtitling of The Wire: Changes of style and substance. Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice, 12(1), 23–49.
Piazza, R., Bednarek, M., & Rossi, F.
(Eds.) (2011) Telecinematic Discourse: Approaches to the Language of Films and Television Series. John Benjamins.
Quaglio, P.
(2009) Television Dialogue: The Sitcom Friends vs. Natural Conversation. John Benjamins.
Rayson, P., & Garside, R.
(1998) The CLAWS web tagger. ICAME Journal, 22(4), 121–123.
Simpson, R., Briggs, L., Ovens, J., & Swales, J.
(2002) The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English. The Regents of the University of Michigan.
Tiedemann, J.
(2016) OPUS – parallel corpora for everyone. Baltic Journal of Modern Computing, 4(2), 384.
Veirano Pinto, M.
(2014) Dimensions of variation in North American movies. In T. Berber Sardinha & M. Veirano Pinto (Eds.), Multi-dimensional Analysis, 25 Years on: A Tribute to Douglas Biber (pp. 109–146). John Benjamins.
(2018) Variation in movies and television programs: The impact of corpus sampling. In V. Werner (Ed.), The Language of Pop Culture (pp. 139–161). Routledge.