Corpus linguistics—past, present, future: A view from Oslo

Stig Johansson

University of Oslo

Abstract

The paper gives an overview of developments in the use of corpora in English language
research, from corpora before computers, through the small (from our present
perspective) classical corpora, to the vast and varied collections that are now available.
Special attention is paid to ICAME, the International Computer Archive of Modern
English (now: the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English),
which from its modest beginnings in 1977 has turned into a world-wide community of
scholars active in the field. Some areas where there has been considerable achievement,
and where there is a great potential for future work, are singled out: language variation,
lexis, grammar, and contrastive linguistics. After about forty years of computer-corpus
research, much has been achieved, but it is likely that we are only at the beginning of the
era of corpus linguistics. If corpora are used with care and imagination, corpus studies
have a bright future.

1. Introduction

First of all, I am greatly honoured to be invited to give a talk to this conference.
Thank you very much.

I was asked to talk about corpus linguistics in retrospect and in prospect. It

was an oversight on my part that I picked the title “Corpus linguistics—past,
present, future”, which was similar to the topic of a lecture given previously to
this association by Jan Aarts. I hope, however, that it will be instructive to
compare the ways in which we approach the subject. Although we share the view
that corpus studies are fundamental in linguistics, we have been involved in
different projects, and this must inevitably have led to some differences in
emphasis and point of view.

2.

What is corpus linguistics?

‘Corpus linguistics’ is a fairly new term, but it is frequently used. We find it in
book titles such as Corpus Linguistics: Recent Developments in the Use of
Computer Corpora in English Language Research (edited by Jan Aarts and
Willem Meijs, 1984), Corpus Linguistics Hard and Soft (edited by Merja Kytö et
al. 1988), English Corpus Linguistics (edited by Karin Aijmer and Bengt
Altenberg, 1991), Directions in Corpus Linguistics (edited by Jan Svartvik, 1992),
and Graeme Kennedy’s Introduction to Corpus Linguistics (1998), to mention
just a few. There is a journal called the International Journal of Corpus

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Linguistics, of which I am the consulting editor. And there is an association of
English corpus linguistics in Japan, which is the only national organisation, as far
as I know.

The term ‘corpus linguistics’ may, however, be misleading. It is not

comparable with a term like sociolinguistics, which is defined by the object of
study: language and society. The aim of corpus linguistics is to study language
through corpora. It is an approach to the study of language. Note what Wallace
Chafe wrote in a paper published in the early 1990s:

What, then is a ‘corpus linguist’? I would like to think that it is a
linguist who tries to understand language, and behind language the
mind, by carefully observing extensive natural samples of it and then,
with insight and imagination, constructing plausible understandings
that encompass and explain those observations. […] But I continue to
believe that one should not characterize linguists, or researchers of
any kind, in terms of a single favorite tie to reality. […] I would like
to see the day when we will all be more versatile in our methodologies,
skilled at integrating all the techniques we will be able to discover for
understanding this most basic, most fascinating, but also most elusive
manifestation of the human mind. (Chafe 1992: 96)

Although the term is not unproblematic, it may be useful to talk about corpus
linguistics to underline that it is an important and useful approach to language
studies. Is it really necessary to say this? I am afraid it is. Bas Aarts, University
College London, made an interview with Noam Chomsky a few years ago
(February 1996, private communication; see also Aarts 2000: 5f.). In response to
the question “What is your view of modern corpus linguistics?” Chomsky said “It
doesn’t exist. If you have nothing, or if you are stuck, or if you’re worried about
Gothic, then you have no choice.” Later in the interview he said: “You don’t take
a corpus, you ask questions.”

I beg to differ. There is no conflict between using a corpus and asking

questions. It is not possible to do anything interesting with a corpus if we do not
take care in formulating research questions. But there is a danger these days
when corpora are easily available and ready to use that we forget this. Many years
ago Bengt Sigurd made the following remark in a paper on the effects of the
computer on linguistics:

The computer easily fills a cellar with tables showing what letters are
most frequent in the third word of sentences, what words contain the
letter y, what words are followed by och [‘and’], etc. It is easy for a
linguist to drown in this sea of information. But linguistic facts are
only interesting scientifically if they can be related to other facts, and
can be interpreted and explained. The computer easily fills a whole
cellar with answers to which it may be difficult to find sensible
questions. (Sigurd 1980, quoted in translation)

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Corpus linguistics—past, present, future: A view from Oslo

Using a corpus without formulating a question is like looking for a needle in a
haystack—and having forgotten what one is looking for.

Traditionally, before the age of computer corpora, linguists who were

concerned with text-related studies started out with a research question and
collected material that was suitable for studying this. It was usually a long and
laborious process. What is important in going to a computer corpus that
somebody else has compiled is to consider whether it is suitable for our research
question. Not: here I have a corpus, what can I do with it? But: I have a research
question, is the corpus appropriate?

What sorts of questions can we ask? I would like to stress that there is a

wide range of possible questions. Many years ago Dell Hymes wrote that “…
four questions arise in the study of language and other forms of communication:

● whether (and to what degree) something is formally possible;

● whether (and to what degree) something is feasible in virtue of

the means of implementation available;

● whether (and to what degree) something is appropriate (adequate,

happy, successful) in relation to a context in which it is used and
evaluated;

● whether (and to what degree) something is in fact done, actually

performed, and what its doing entails.” (Hymes 1972: 281)

Linguists have a tendency to dictate the sorts of questions that are considered
essential or respectable to ask. I think we should be open to different types of
questions, whether we use corpora or not. For some types of question corpora are
essential, if not indispensable.

Formulating research questions is our primary task. Graeme Kennedy puts

it in this way in his book on corpus linguistics:

Linguists use corpora to answer questions and solve problems. […]
The most important skill is not to be able to program a computer or
even to manipulate available software (which, in any case, is
increasingly user-friendly). Rather, it is to be able to ask insightful
questions which address real issues and problems in theoretical,
descriptive and applied language studies.

(Kennedy 1998: 2)

The questions we can ask are only limited by our imagination. It is our task as
corpus linguists to formulate important research questions.

3.

Corpora—old and new

Although the term ‘corpus linguistics’ is relatively new, the notion of a corpus is
an old one. The Oxford English Dictionary records the use of the word in the
sense of a collection of texts from the first half of the 18

th

century:

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A body or complete collection of writings or the like; the whole body
or collection of literature on any subject.

The linguistic use of the term is recorded from 1956 and is defined as follows:

The body of written or spoken material upon which a linguistic
analysis is based.

Following W. Nelson Francis, a corpus pioneer who sadly passed away earlier
this year (2002), the corpus approach is much older. In a paper published in 1992
he writes about “Language corpora B.C.”, which in this case does not mean
before Christ, but before computers—or perhaps before the Brown Corpus!
Nelson Francis refers to the vast data collections for large dictionary, dialect, and
grammar projects, like Johnson’s dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary, the
Survey of English Dialects, and Jespersen’s Modern English Grammar.

These corpora could not be manipulated by computer programs to reveal

patterns which might be hard to discover by other means. They could not be
easily transported beyond the place of origin. Above all, corpora B.C. frequently
consisted of collections of citations rather than texts. Hence they were inevitably
biased by the perspective of those who had collected the material. This is true of
the collections for the Oxford English Dictionary and Jespersen’s Modern
English Grammar, to take two celebrated examples. Commenting on the
collections of some classical English grammarians, Nelson Francis points out that
they are “inevitably skewed in the direction of the unusual and interesting
constructions that the readers encounter, at the expense of the natural use of
language” (Francis 1992: 28f.). James Murray makes a similar point about the
quotations collected at the early stages of the project which led to the Oxford
English Dictionary: “the editor or his assistants have to search for precious hours
for examples of common words, which readers passed by … Thus of Abusion, we
found in the slips about 50 instances: of Abuse not five.” The instructions were
accordingly adjusted to include: “Make as many quotations as you can for
ordinary words, especially when they are used significantly, and tend by the
context to explain or suggest their own meaning” (quoted from Murray 1979:
178).

The natural solution to this problem is to collect texts in a systematic

manner and subject them to the principle of ‘total accountability’. This was the
thinking behind the Survey of English Usage corpus (Quirk 1960), which was
‘B.C.’ in its conception, but has later been computerised. With this sort of corpus
and the proper computational tools, it is possible to study “the capriccio of
language” as well as “the equally characteristic ostinato”, to quote from Sture
Allén (1992: 1), a pioneering Swedish corpus linguist and former secretary of the
Swedish Academy. Linguists who use a computer corpus and attempt to take
account of all the material relevant to their research question may be forced to see
what they might otherwise overlook.

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The Survey of English Usage was a breakthrough in the study of the

English language. Texts, both written and spoken, were collected in a principled
manner. They were carefully annotated for a range of features, and the material
was recorded on index cards which were kept in filing cabinets at University
College London. Researchers used to visit London to inspect the valuable
material. We are now very close to our notion of a corpus, except that the
material was not yet available on computer. But we are on the eve of what some
people have termed ‘the corpus revolution’.

4.

From the Survey of English Usage to the Brown Corpus

In his paper on “Problems of assembling and computerizing large corpora”
Nelson Francis writes that, when they were planning the Brown Corpus, they
convened a conference of “corpus-wise scholars”, including the director of the
Survey of English Usage, Randolph Quirk. He continued:

This group decided the size of the corpus (1,000,000 words), the
number of texts (500, of 2,000 words each), the universe (material in
English, by American writers, first printed in the United States in the
calendar year 1961), the subdivisions (15 genres, 9 of ‘informative
prose and 6 of ‘imaginative prose’) and by a fascinating process of
individual vote and average consensus, how many samples from each
genre (ranging from 6 in science fiction to 80 in learned and
scientific). (Francis 1982: 16)

Francis goes on to give further details on the text selection, he comments briefly
on the process of computerising the material, and in passing he mentions the cost
of producing the corpus:

The million of words of the Brown Corpus cost the United States
Office of Education about $ 23,000 in 1963–64, or about 2.3 cents a
word. (Francis 1982: 15)

In retrospect, we must say that this money was indeed very well spent.

The Brown Corpus has been significant in a number of respects. It

established a pattern for the use of electronic corpora in linguistics, at a time
when corpora were negatively regarded by linguists in the United States, as
shown by the well-known story of the meeting between Nelson Francis and
Robert Lees, one of the leading generative grammarians at the time (Francis
1982: 7). It was significant in the care which was taken to systematically sample
texts for the corpus and provide detailed documentation in the accompanying
manual (Francis and Kučera 1964, 1971, 1979). But the world-wide importance
of the Brown Corpus stems from the generosity and foresight shown by the
compilers in making the corpus available to researchers all over the world.

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5.

The International Computer Archive of Modern English (ICAME)

In the early 1970s Geoffrey Leech at the University of Lancaster took the
initiative to compile a British counterpart of the Brown Corpus. This is what he
had to say about it at the first ICAME Conference in Bergen in 1979:

About seven or eight years ago I wrote to Nelson Francis, who at the
time had already completed his Brown Corpus, and I said “Wouldn’t
it be a jolly good idea if somebody did a parallel corpus for British
English?” … I remember Nelson was extremely friendly and helpful.
He gave us all the information so that we could learn from his work,
and the last thing he said to us was “Rather you than me. I wouldn’t
do it myself, but I send you my best wishes.” (quoted from the
ICAME Journal 20: 100f.)

Given the technical resources at the time, the making of a million-word corpus
was a major undertaking. After a great deal of work had been done at Lancaster,
the project was taken over and finished in Norway, through cooperation between
the University of Oslo and the Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities
at Bergen. This is how the corpus got its name: the Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen Corpus.

Compiling the LOB Corpus was no easy task, in spite of the excellent

example set by the Brown Corpus. One difficult problem, which had threatened
to stop the whole project, was the copyright issue. This led indirectly to the
beginning of the International Computer Archive of Modern English (ICAME).

In February 1977, a small group of people met in Oslo to discuss the

copyright issue as well as corpus work in general. Geoffrey Leech came from
Lancaster with a suitcaseful of corpus texts. The other participants were: Nelson
Francis, who was then visiting professor at the University of Trondheim in
Norway, Jan Svartvik, who was working on the London-Lund Corpus, Jostein
Hauge, director of the Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities, Arthur
O. Sandved, chairman of the English department at the University of Oslo, and
myself.

The outcome of the meeting was a document announcing the beginning of

ICAME. I quote a passage from the text (see the ICAME Journal 20: 101f.):

The undersigned, meeting in Oslo in February 1977, have informally
established the nucleus of an International Computer Archive of
Modern English (ICAME). The primary purposes of the organization
will be:

1) collecting and distributing information on English language

material available for computer processing;

2) collecting and distributing information on linguistic research

completed or in progress on the material;

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3) compiling an archive of corpuses to be located at the University

of Bergen, from where copies could be obtained at cost.

One of the main aims in establishing the organization is to make
possible and encourage the coordination of research effort and avoid
duplication of research.

The document announcing the establishment of ICAME was circulated to
scholars active in the field, and it was used to support applications for permission
to include texts in the LOB Corpus.

6.

From the Brown Corpus to the LOB Corpus

What was it like working on a corpus at this time? In the first instance we had to
identify the copyright holders, which was a difficult task as there were several
hundred. We (that is, I) wrote several hundred letters asking for permission. If
there was no reply, we had to write again, and in some cases we had to replace
texts that had previously been selected at Lancaster. While this was going on, we
also proofread and corrected the texts. Most of the texts had been typed in using
rather primitive equipment, and there were many errors. Knut Hofland at the
Centre in Bergen provided printouts, and in Oslo we (that is, mainly I) checked
the texts for errors and inconsistencies in coding. These were then corrected by
staff at Bergen. By the end of 1978 we had finished the LOB Corpus and
published the manual to go with the corpus, where details are given on the
sampling and coding of the corpus texts (Johansson et al. 1978). By this time
there had been great advances in computer technology, so the format of the LOB
Corpus was easier to read and handle than the original Brown Corpus. At about
the same time Knut Hofland made a revised version of the original Brown Corpus,
with upper- and lower-case letters and other features which reduced the need for
special codes and made the text more easily readable. At this time we had also
started a newsletter, ICAME News (which later became the ICAME Journal), and
the Centre in Bergen had started distributing corpora under the auspices of
ICAME (see further 7.5 below).

Matching the British and the American corpus was not always

straightforward (see Johansson 1992). For example, it was not easy to match the
‘Adventure and western’ category in the Brown Corpus. For this reason, the LOB
Corpus contains more general adventure stories, though there are also some texts
set in former British colonies, a setting which was thought to resemble the
western situation to some extent. More important, there were necessarily some
differences in the newspaper categories, as the pattern of newspaper publishing is
quite different in the United Kingdom and the United States. These matters are
discussed in detail in the LOB Corpus manual.

The matching becomes even harder with other corpora compiled according

to the Brown and LOB model, and it is a problem which besets all attempts to
replicate corpora in different languages or across varieties of the same language. I

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am not suggesting that it is impossible or that such attempts should be given up,
but rather that great care should go into the planning of such projects, and
possible problems should be kept in mind in evaluating results from a comparison
of such corpora.

After the LOB Corpus had been completed, the next task was to tag the

corpus so that it could be used more efficiently for linguistic studies. A
symposium on grammatical tagging was held in Bergen in March 1979. There
were some 30–40 participants, including: Jan Aarts, Alvar Ellegård, Geoffrey
Leech, Randolph Quirk, Jan Svartvik, and the two Brown Corpus pioneers,
Nelson Francis and Henry Kučera.

Alvar Ellegård presented his detailed system of manual tagging used for

parts of the Brown Corpus (see Ellegård 1978), Jan Aarts described the system
developed at Nijmegen (see Aarts and van den Heuvel 1980), and Nelson Francis
and Henry Kučera spoke about the automatic word class tagging system used for
the Brown Corpus (see the report in ICAME News 2, 1979). The most tangible
result of the symposium was the promise, extracted by Geoffrey Leech in
exchange for a couple of bottles of wine, that the tagged Brown Corpus would be
put at our disposal in our work on the tagging of the LOB Corpus.

Before I move on to this, let me just say that nobody knew at the time that

the symposium in 1979 would be the start of a whole series of ICAME
conferences. A second conference was held in Bergen in 1981. One of the
participants was Magnus Ljung, who undertook to organise a conference in
Stockholm the following year. This was the start of the regular ICAME
conferences, which have been arranged annually since then.

The availability of the tagged Brown Corpus was of crucial importance for

the tagging of the LOB Corpus, although our project opted for a probabilistic
rather than a rule-based approach to tagging and disambiguation, an exciting idea
originating from Geoffrey Leech. The tagged Brown Corpus provided the first
probabilities for tag combinations in the tagging suite which later came to be
knows as CLAWS (Constituent-Likelihood Automatic Word-tagging System; see
the description in Garside et al. 1987).

The tagging of the LOB Corpus took a long time, not just because new

programs were developed, but also because of all the work that went into the
manual post-editing of the corpus. For me it meant hundreds of hours checking
the consistency of tagging, the general idea being that the post-edited corpus
would provide a better basis for statistics on tag combinations, and that these
could in turn be used in further development of the tagging suite. Again there was
cooperation between Oslo and Bergen. Knut Hofland provided me with
concordances for troublesome words. I checked the consistency of tagging and
sent lists of corrections back to Bergen. I have reported on some experiences
from the post-editing in a paper on “Grammatical tagging and total
accountability” (Johansson 1985). Examining the output of the automatic tagging
programs was not just a lot of hard work, it also gave me new insight. To take a
couple of examples from the paper:

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a. The earnings rule was analysed as determiner + plural common

noun + verb rather than as determiner + plural noun + singular
noun. Still was identified as a singular noun in the rich still
supplied the traditional revenues. Orange planters and grave
digger were tagged as adjective + noun, and the same applies to
the last two words in stripping off to just underpants. These are
grammatically likely interpretations, though inappropriate in the
context. They could easily be corrected.

b. In other cases there was no single correct tagging, as in He didn’t

like her wearing jeans. Should her be analysed as a possessive
determiner or as an accusative form of the pronoun? What tag
should be assigned to in in expressions like in here and in there?
This is a context where we find both typical prepositions, such as
from, and typical adverbial particles, such as back. To take
another example, what tag should be assigned to like in feeling
very like a child, preposition or adjective?

Even greater problems were posed by -ed forms and, in particular, -ing forms,
which are chameleon-like and notoriously multifunctional (see the discussion in
the manual for the tagged LOB Corpus, Johansson et al. 1986). Having to deal
with a corpus in this way concentrates the mind. In retrospect, it could perhaps be
said that all the effort that went into the post-editing was misguided. Is it always
advisable to opt for a single tag? There is genuine ambiguity in language, there
are not always clear borderlines. Ideally the tagging system should reflect the
indeterminacy in language.

Before I leave this topic, I should point out that there are some differences

in the tagging of the Brown and LOB corpora, both in the tag set and in the way
distinctions were drawn. This means that comparisons based on the tagged
versions of the two corpora must be made with caution.

7. Developments

From LOB and Brown I turn now to some of the most significant trends up to the
present time. The development has been explosive, partly due to the rapid
technological advances and partly because of the increasing interest among
linguists in the study of language use rather than language systems in the abstract.

7.1 Quantity

of

text

The most obvious change has to do with the quantity of text. We now have
corpora of millions of words, such as the hundred-million-word British National
Corpus and the Bank of English, which is reported to contain several hundred
million words. The very notion of a corpus has undergone changes. As early as

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1982 John Sinclair introduced his idea of monitor corpora, referring to gigantic,
slowly changing stores of text (Sinclair 1982: 4), and in recent years we have
witnessed a virtual explosion of material on the web, and some people speak
about the web as a corpus.

In view of these developments, is the traditional notion of a corpus

obsolete? I believe not. The material on the web is a good supplement, but not a
substitute. The quality of the material is variable, and the origin is often uncertain.
Something may still be said for smaller, carefully constructed corpora which can
be analysed exhaustively in a variety of ways. These will be needed for types of
texts which are not readily available in machine-readable form, not least spoken
material. Such texts will have to be keyboarded in the foreseeable future. There is
no simple answer to the question how a corpus should be structured and how
large it should be. It depends upon the research question.

7.2 Variety

of

text

In planning the Survey of English Usage, Randolph Quirk outlined an impressive
scheme to represent a wide variety of types of spoken and written English. The
idea of representing a broad range of texts was a guiding principle in the
compilation of the Brown and LOB corpora, except that speech was not included.
Some of the large corpora compiled in recent years have also been intended to be
broadly representative, notably the British National Corpus, which was planned
according to a careful design to represent present-day British English.

There is similar variety in some recent smaller corpora, such as the clones

of the Brown and LOB corpora (FROWN and FLOB) compiled at the University
of Freiburg under the direction of Christian Mair and the corpora within the
International Corpus of English (ICE) project initiated by Sidney Greenbaum.
The primary aim of these projects is to study recent changes in English and
geographical variation in English, respectively.

Apart from such broad-range corpora, there are many more specialised

corpora, such as:

•

historical corpora for studying language change, e.g. the Helsinki Corpus
and associated corpora compiled under the direction of Matti Rissanen and
his colleagues;

•

learner language corpora, such as the International Corpus of Learner
English (ICLE), a project initiated and coordinated by Sylviane Granger;

•

bilingual and multilingual corpora for contrastive analysis and translation
studies, e.g. the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus and the Oslo
Multilingual Corpus (see 8.4 below).

The variation in the types of corpora reflects the research questions of the
compilers.

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7.3 Quality

of

text

The Survey of English corpus set a standard not just in the principled approach to
text collection, but also with respect to the quality of the text. As mentioned
above (Section 3), all the texts were carefully annotated, and the spoken material
was transcribed in great detail, noting not just stress and intonation, but also
paralinguistic features, such as tempo and voice quality (some of the notation was
sacrificed when the spoken material was computerised and was made available as
the London-Lund Corpus; cf. Svartvik and Quirk (1980)).

The earliest computer corpora consisted of raw text, but both the Brown

and the LOB corpora were later annotated on the word-class level (cf. Section 6
above), allowing more sophisticated searches and analyses. With the development
of automatic tagging programs, it has become possible to tag even large corpora
like the British National Corpus (though only a small portion of the texts have
been checked for errors and post-edited). Syntactically parsed corpora are still
rare, due to the difficulties of analysing syntax by computer, but there seems to be
an increasing interest in building treebanks. Well-known early examples of
treebanks are those built at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of
Lancaster.

An annotated corpus which has recently become available is ICE-GB, the

British part of the International Corpus of English (see Nelson et al. 2002), which
has been syntactically annotated and checked and comes with a sophisticated
search program. Moreover, the spoken material has been digitised and linked with
the transcription. As the corpus is relatively small measured by today’s standards,
one million words, it is less useful for lexical studies than the British National
Corpus, but to my mind it is the best-quality English corpus that is currently
available.

7.4 Software

Allied with the building of annotated corpora is the development of programs for
tagging and parsing, such as the CLAWS tagging suite developed at Lancaster
and the TOSCA tools developed at Nijmegen (which were used for the annotation
of ICE-GB). From the user’s point of view, it is significant that search programs
have become increasingly user-friendly, making linguists less dependent upon
computational expertise. Good examples of user-friendly and yet sophisticated
programs are Mike Scott’s WordSmith Tools and the International Corpus of
English Corpus Utility Program (ICECUP).

7.5 Distribution

of

texts

Another significant development has to do with the forms of distribution of
corpora. I have already mentioned the generosity of the Brown Corpus compilers
in making their corpus available to researchers across the world. As pointed out

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in Section 5, one of the aims in starting ICAME was to compile an archive of
corpora which could be obtained by the research community. The distribution
started as early as 1978 at the Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities at
Bergen.

Initially, the material was made available in the form of magnetic tapes

containing texts and concordances for use with mainframe computers. Also
distributed were texts on diskette and concordances on microfiche. By the end of
1989, after approximately a decade, the number of data sets that had been
distributed amounted to: magnetic tape 390, microfiche 105, diskette 166. The
receivers were a large number of institutions in countries across the world,
including approximately 40 Japanese institutions. Most of the data sets distributed
at this time were texts or concordances for the Brown Corpus, the LOB Corpus,
and the London-Lund Corpus.

Since 1990 the form of distribution has changed radically, and it is now

virtually limited to texts (and programs) on the ICAME CD-ROM, which has
turned out to be much sought after. The available material has been expanded to
include a number of new corpora, both spoken and written, contemporary and
diachronic, corpora of raw texts and parsed corpora. Up-to-date information on
the ICAME archive is found at: http://helmer.aksis.uib.no/icame.html.

As early as the middle of the 1970s electronic texts began to be distributed

by the Oxford Text Archive, which holds a wide variety of texts in English and
other languages. With the increasing interest in the use of electronic texts for
research, other institutions have been established as well, such as the Linguistic
Data Consortium in the United States, which caters especially for computational
linguists and researchers in natural language processing.

The question of copyright continues to be a thorny issue in corpus work.

Corpus workers must abide by the same rules that apply to machine-readable
texts in general. This means that texts cannot be copied and shared among
researchers unless permission has been obtained from copyright holders. Such
permission may be difficult to obtain, and many corpora are therefore not
available outside the institutions where they were compiled. There are, for
example, severe restrictions on the use of the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus
and the Oslo Multilingual Corpus, not because we do not want to share our
material with others, but because we are restricted by our agreement with
copyright holders. An important task for corpus workers is to investigate whether
it is feasible to work out better conditions for the use of machine-readable texts
for non-profit language research.

7.6 New

organisations

The fast increasing interest in the use of corpora has led to the rise of new
organisations catering for corpus workers. Since 1992 there have been
conferences every other year on “Teaching and Language Corpora” (TaLC). We
also have “Practical Applications in Language Corpora” (PALC), which is
arranging its fourth conference at the University of Lodz in Poland in 2003, and

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350

-1965 1966-

1970

1971-

1975

1976-

1980

1981-

1985

1986-

1990

“Corpus Use and Learning to Translate” (CULT), which had its last conference in
Bertinoro in Italy in 2000. Quite a different group, chiefly consisting of
computational linguists and researchers in natural language processing, have had
a series of annual meetings known as the “Workshop on Very Large Corpora”
(WVLC) since 1994. The different nature of these organisations testifies to the
wide range of uses of corpus studies.

Among other organisations I would like to single out the Japan Association

of English Corpus Studies (JAECS), which is now celebrating its first ten years
and seems to be flourishing, as testified by the number of participants at this
conference, by the activities reported on the JAECS web site, and not least by the
high quality of the contributions to the recent book on English Corpus Linguistics
in Japan (edited by Toshio Saito, Junsaku Nakamura, and Shunji Yamazaki,
2002).

8. Achievements

It is high time to say something about what has been achieved in our corpus
studies. If we had just assembled corpora and formed organisations, we would not
have made much progress. Have we gained new insight into language? Let me
start by saying something about the growth in the number of corpus-based studies.
For a number of years Bengt Altenberg at Lund University in Sweden maintained
a bibliography of publications based on or related to the English text corpora
distributed through ICAME (see the ICAME web site). The pattern up to about
1990 is shown in Figure 1 (based on the figures in Johansson 1991: 312; I have
made no comparable survey since then). Included in these counts are studies of
different kinds: theoretical, descriptive, and applied.

Figure 1. Publications on English text corpora

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Below I will single out some areas where there has been considerable

achievement, and where there is a great potential for further work in the future. I
confine my remarks to studies of present-day English, though I am aware that
there have been great advances in English historical corpus studies, primarily
inspired by Matti Rissanen and his group at the University of Helsinki (and I note
the prominence of historical studies in Saito et al. 2002). Incidentally, to
recognise the growing importance of historical studies, the official name of
ICAME was changed some years ago to the International Computer Archive of
Modern and Medieval English, but the acronym ICAME remains.

8.1 Language

variation

The study of language variation can hardly be undertaken without reference to a
body of language data, and corpora provide a very good basis for such studies.
One important early publication is Tottie and Bäcklund (1986), a collection of
papers examining different aspects of spoken and written English, most of them
based on the LOB Corpus and the London-Lund Corpus. A couple of years later
Douglas Biber published his important and influential book on Variation Across
Speech and Writing (Biber 1988), based on material from the LOB Corpus and
the London-Lund Corpus. We also find monographs dealing with special areas,
such as Tottie (1991), which examines negation in speech as in writing, and
Collins (1991), which deals with the use of cleft sentences in different genres of
speech and writing. On the whole, the study of spoken English has advanced
greatly as a result of the availability of spoken corpora, not least the London-
Lund Corpus.

Another type of variation study where corpus work has been significant is

the comparison of different geographical varieties of English. Many such studies
have used the Brown Corpus and its ‘clones’ (for British English, Australian
English, etc.), e.g. the quantitative comparison of modals in the Brown and LOB
corpora by Junsaku Nakamura (1993). As the new ICE corpora (the International
Corpus of English) become available, we can expect to gain new knowledge
about first- and second-language varieties of English across the world. Studies of
the associated ICLE corpora (International Corpus of Learner English) will yield
new information on English as used by foreign language learners as well as give
new insight into second-language acquisition.

8.2 Lexis

Lexicography is perhaps the area where corpora have had the greatest impact so
far. This is not surprising. There is a long tradition for collecting citations to
support lexicographical work, although the collection has often been biased
towards the unusual (cf. Section 3 above). An important milestone is the Collins
COBUILD English Language Dictionary (1987), which was a breakthrough for
the corpus-based approach in lexicography. In recent years new English

17

dictionaries generally claim that they are corpus-based. The influence of corpora
in lexicography was shown very clearly in many papers at the recent EURALEX
conference in Copenhagen.

The principal tool of the lexicographer is a computer-generated

concordance list. Such lists are very revealing in the study of collocations, i.e.
habitual combinations of words. The notion of collocation is not new, but it has
only become possible to study collocations systematically after large computer
corpora have become available. The significance of collocations has been
emphasised particularly by John Sinclair, who stresses the ‘idiom principle’ in
language use:

The principle of idiom is that a language user has available to him or
her a large number of semi-preconstructed phrases that constitute
single choices, even though they might appear to be analysable into
segments. (Sinclair 1991: 110)

John Sinclair suggests that the idiom principle, rather than being a minor feature
compared with grammar, is “at least as important as grammar in the explanation
of how meaning arises in text” (p. 112). This brings me to my next point.

8.3 Grammar

A large number of corpus-based books and articles on grammar have appeared in
the last couple of decades, but I will confine myself to a couple of important
publications. Through the Survey of English Usage (cf. Section 3), the ground
was prepared for the writing of a new grammar drawing on the material. All the
four authors of A Grammar of Contemporary English (1972)—Randolph Quirk,
Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik—had been involved in the
Survey of English Usage, and this has certainly left its mark in many places in the
grammar. Nevertheless, it is significant that the word corpus does not appear in
the book, except in the context of the discussion of plural forms of Latin
loanwords ending in -us. When the same author team published A Comprehensive
Grammar of the English Language (CGEL) in 1985, it was a different situation.
In the subject index we find numerous references to the classic corpora: the
Brown Corpus, the LOB Corpus, the London-Lund Corpus, and the corpus of the
Survey of English Usage. This can be interpreted as a sign of the breakthrough of
corpus studies.
CGEL is a monumental work and will remain a major resource for English
grammar for years to come. However, in its use of corpus material it can perhaps
best be described as corpus-informed rather than corpus-based. We can see this if
we make a comparison with the new Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written
English (LGSWE, Biber et al. 1999), which seems to be well-known in Japan,
judging by the numerous references in Saito et al. (2002).
In

LGSWE the word corpus appears on almost every page. While CGEL

was a synthesis of the knowledge of English grammar at the time, the aim of

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LGSWE was to re-examine English grammar in the light of a large corpus. This
does not mean that previous work was neglected, but the main emphasis was on
new findings based on new material. The book starts out by presenting the
carefully thought-out structure of the corpus. Throughout the book findings are
reported for four main registers: academic prose, news reportage, fiction, and
conversation. Findings are not just reported, in each case there is an attempt at an
explanation of the patterns observed.

Time does not allow me to go into detail. How does LGSWE compare with

CGEL? LGSWE is certainly less comprehensive, but it contains a lot of
information which cannot be found in CGEL, particularly on quantitative
distributions of grammatical features in the four registers. Of greatest significance
is probably the new insight into the grammar of conversation, which is the topic
of the final chapter in the book. LGSWE certainly does not replace CGEL. Rather,
the two grammar should be seen as complementary.

The lesson I learned in working on LGSWE is how difficult it is to get at

many grammatical features. It is indeed very valuable to have available a large
computer corpus and software tools for analysing the material. Our corpus was
tagged at word class level, but a lot would have been gained if we had been able
to access a syntactically analysed corpus like ICE-GB (cf. Section 7.3), although
this is relatively small. As it was, we had to use a combination of manual and
computational techniques, and some studies had to be based on manual analysis
of a small selection from the corpus. The user of the book is advised to pay
attention to the analysis notes in the book which specify what material was taken
into account in each study.
LGSWE is not the ultimate corpus-based grammar, but it is a start. Some
people will object that the approach is not radical enough. By tagging the corpus
we imposed a set of pre-defined categories, and the results we get will reflect
what we put in. An alternative is to use a corpus-driven approach, in the manner
which is associated particularly with John Sinclair and his followers. This is how
the corpus-driven approach is defined in a recent book:

In a corpus-driven approach the commitment of the linguist is to the
integrity of the data as a whole, and descriptions aim to be
comprehensive with respect to corpus evidence. The corpus, therefore,
is seen as more than a repository of examples to back pre-existing
theories or a probabilistic extension to an already defined system. The
theoretical statements are fully consistent with, and reflect directly,
the evidence provided by the corpus. Indeed, many of the statements
are of a kind that are not usually accessible by any other means than
the inspection of corpus evidence. Examples are normally taken
verbatim, in other words they are not adjusted to fit the predefined
categories of the analyst; recurrent patterns and frequency
distributions are expected to form the basic evidence for linguistic
categories; the absence of a pattern is considered potentially
meaningful. (Tognini-Bonelli 2001: 84)

19

The study of distributional patterns in large corpora has led John Sinclair (1999:
8) to propose a model of language where “the main organising principle of text is
the lexical item, a unit which typically consists of several words and which
permits a considerable amount of variation in its realisation […]. The lexical item
organises both the semantics and the grammar within it, and is not confined by
grammatical unit boundaries.” It is along these lines that Susan Hunston and Gill
Francis formulate their pattern grammar (Hunston and Francis 2000).

It is difficult to predict what grammars in the future will look like, but

there is no doubt that they will be heavily influenced by corpus studies. I will
mention one possible avenue which I have pointed out a few times in the past (e.g.
in Johansson 1998a: 269ff.). Traditionally, there has been a gap between the
study of grammar and lexis. Lexis used to be left largely to the lexicographers,
grammar to the grammarians. Yet there are large areas of overlap. Dictionaries
generally provide some grammatical information, at least part of speech labels
and often much more than that. Grammars regularly contain lists of words that
have particular characteristics, e.g. uncountable nouns or verbs that take
particular types of complements. I would like to see an integrated model with
grammar and lexicon linked to each other and to a corpus (see Figure 2). This
will have to be realised in electronic form, freed from the restrictions of paper
publications. The result will be a coherent language description. To the user,
dictionary and grammar will no longer be separated. They will no longer be
collections of observations and examples out of context, but a guide to language
in use. What I am proposing is long-term project, but I believe it is a goal worth
striving for in the future.

Dictionary

Grammar

Corpus

Figure 2. Dictionary, grammar, and corpus: an integrated model

8.4 Languages

in

contrast

As my last example, I will briefly touch on bilingual and multilingual corpus
studies, an area where there has been a virtual explosion in the last decade or so.
There are many good reasons for studying bilingual and multilingual corpora. As
we wrote in the early stages of our work on the English-Norwegian Parallel
Corpus,

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Language comparison is of great interest in a theoretical as well as an
applied perspective. It reveals what is general and what is language
specific and is therefore important both for the understanding of
language in general and for the study of the individual languages
compared. (Johansson and Hofland 1994: 25)

There are important applications in foreign language teaching, bilingual
lexicography, the training of translators, and natural language processing (see
Véronis 2000).

The types of research questions can be seen from the model for the

English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus, which is reproduced as Figure 3. We can
compare:

● original texts in the two languages;
● original texts and translations in either direction;
● original vs. translated texts in each language;
● translated texts across languages.

See further Johansson (1998b) and the following web sites: http://www.hf.uio.no/
iba/prosjekt, http://www.hf.uio.no/german/sprik. From the start with the English-
Norwegian Parallel Corpus, we have expanded our scope to include other
languages, and at present we are focusing on English, German, French, and
Norwegian. As the scope is expanded, so does the range of possible research
questions, and the more general questions can we ask on the nature of language
and translation.

Although there has been a great deal of work recently on bilingual and

multilingual corpora, I believe that this research area is only in a beginning phase,
and much more can be expected in the future.

Figure 3. The structure of the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus

ENGLISH

ORIGINALS

NORWEGIAN

TRANSLATIONS

ENGLISH

TRANSLATIONS

NORWEGIAN

ORIGINALS

21

9.

Prospects for the future

In my talk I have only been able to follow some trends in the development of
corpus studies, and I have presented a view from my own perspective, mainly
focusing on work which I have been involved in personally. It is an almost
impossible task to give a fully satisfactory overview of a field which is
developing so fast. As Graeme Kennedy writes in his introduction to corpus
linguistics,

[…] such is the speed of development and change in corpus
linguistics at the present time that anyone writing about it must be
conscious that it could be easy to produce a Ptolemaic picture of the
field with the world distorted […] (Kennedy 1998: 2)

It is even harder to make predictions for the future, though I have suggested some
avenues ahead.

As we move ahead, we must not forget the lessons from the past. The

transportability of computer corpora has meant that material which it would be
beyond any individual to produce has been put at the disposal of linguists across
the world. Much has been gained by having a common basis of reference and by
subjecting the same material to systematic study from different points of view. It
is my hope that the spirit of cooperation that we found among the corpus pioneers
will not be forgotten, no matter what other changes will follow.

Ten years ago Jan Svartvik used the title “Corpus linguistics comes of

age” in his introduction to Directions in Corpus Linguistics, and he wrote:

Towards the end of the 1980s some of us felt that corpus linguistics
had come of age and should satisfy the criteria for Nobel Symposia:
being a field of great scientific importance and great relevance to
society. (Svartvik 1992: 12)

It is a sign of the recognition both of Jan Svartvik himself and of his field that he
could arrange the first Nobel Symposium on Corpus Linguistics in Stockholm in
1991. In the years since then there have been no indications of old age setting in.
The field is strong and vigorous, not least here in Japan, as far as I can judge. If
corpora are used with care and imagination, I believe that corpus studies have a
bright future.

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Web references

ICAME: http://helmer.aksis.uib.no/icame.html
The English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus: http://www.hf.uio.no/iba/prosjekt
The Oslo Multilingual Corpus: http://www.hf.uio.no/german/sprik