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Article published In:
Corpus approaches to telecinematic language
Edited by Monika Bednarek, Valentin Werner and Marcia Veirano Pinto
[International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 26:1] 2021
► pp. 10–37

The TV and Movies corpora

Design, construction, and use

| 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, 200 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 30 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
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Rationale for the TV and Movies corpora
  • 3.Creating the TV and Movies corpora
  • 4.Using metadata to create “Virtual Corpora”
  • 5.Informal nature of the language in the TV and Movies corpora
  • 6.Dialectal and historical variation in English
    • 6.1Dialectal differences
    • 6.2Change over time
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 17 November 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.00035.dav
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