BRITISH NATIONAL CORPUS

Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language | 1998 | 700+ words | Copyright

BRITISH NATIONAL CORPUS. Short form BNC. An electronic CORPUS of texts (compiled 1991–4) drawn principally from UK printed sources and intended in the main for researchers and publishers. The BNC consortium, which consists of academic institutions (the British Library, Oxford University Computing Service, and the University of Lancaster) and publishers (Chambers-Harrap, Longman, and Oxford University Press), has been supported by the UK Department of Trade and Industry. The corpus (sampling from 1960 onwards) consists of 100m running words of BrE, 90m of these from a wide selection of printed texts (technical and literary, books and periodicals, long-term and ephemeral, and including such unpublished material as postcards, tickets, and banknotes) and 10m from unscripted spoken text (at least half of it spontaneous conversation, and drawn from such sources as lectures, tutorials, sales demonstrations, legal proceedings, committee meetings, and broadcast chat shows).

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TOM McARTHUR. "BRITISH NATIONAL CORPUS." Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language. 1998. Encyclopedia.com. 29 May. 2012 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>.

TOM McARTHUR. "BRITISH NATIONAL CORPUS." Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language. 1998. Encyclopedia.com. (May 29, 2012). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O29-BRITISHNATIONALCORPUS.html

TOM McARTHUR. "BRITISH NATIONAL CORPUS." Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language. 1998. Retrieved May 29, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O29-BRITISHNATIONALCORPUS.html

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