Abstract
The creation of internet-based mega-corpora such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) (Davies, 2011a) and the Google Ngram Viewer (Cohen, 2010) signals a new phase in corpus-based research that provides both novice and expert researchers immediate access to a variety of online texts and time-coded data. This paper explores the applications of these corpora in the analysis of academic word lists, in particular, Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List (AWL). Coxhead (2011) has called for further research on the AWL with larger corpora, noting that learners’ use of academic vocabulary needs to address for the AWL to be useful in various contexts. Results show that words on the AWL are declining in overall frequency from 1990 to the present. Implications about the AWL and future directions in corpus-based research utilizing mega-corpora are discussed
Highlights
Over the past several years, research in corpus linguistics has produced generalizable and accurate linguistic information that has been useful in analyzing variation in language (Biber, Conrad, & Reppen, 1998)
Of the 60 Academic Word List (AWL) words analyzed in this study for both platforms, more than 90% are shown to have declined in use from the late-‐1990s to the present
Fifteen words from AWL were found to have higher levels of differences from the set of results obtained from Google Ngram Viewer and Corpus of Historical American English (COHA)
Summary
Over the past several years, research in corpus linguistics has produced generalizable and accurate linguistic information that has been useful in analyzing variation in language (Biber, Conrad, & Reppen, 1998). Searchable corpora and databases with built-‐in interfaces that provide part-‐ of-‐speech (POS) tags, demographic information of writers and speakers of texts, and register-‐specific comparative charts can be retrieved online. This opportunity has made the domain of web-‐based, corpus research user-‐friendly and accessible. Developments such as these have redefined the nature of linguistic research with corpora, which has traditionally been associated only with a specialized group of linguists in academic settings
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