Lancsbox software options for the prospective investigation of the multilingual corpus for European studies

Abstract

The paper presents a comparative analysis of the lexeme European in two language variations (British and American English) based on the built-in corpora represented by newspapers, fiction, etc. that are licensed by LancsBox software (AmE06 and BE06 respectively). The investigation describes the algorithms of implementing linguistic research as part of the project taught during the course “Multilingual Corpus and its Resources for European Studies (KNLU)” (Erasmus+ Program). The LancsBox user-friendly software, that works with major operating systems, has proved to be a powerful manager for compiling and using the existing corpora. It enables to visualize the textual data based on the following software package tools: KWIC, GraphColl, Words, Ngrams, Wizard, etc. essential for the study of a specific linguistic unit. The statistical analysis of both corpora under analysis has revealed that the word European belongs to the lexemes that are seldom employed in the language. The comparison of the two variations has shown that the word occurs in similar top-ten frequent collocates, however, the GraphColl tool visualization has indicated the major differences between two сorpora. Thus, in British English Corpus N+N structures are more commonly employed and are more vibrant than in American English Corpus. The t-test has proved a statistically significant difference between the corpora with regard to the linguistic variable European. These data may testify to cultural differences between the users of two language variations taking into account that both сorpora represent the same time frame.