Information-on-the-BNC_COCA-word-family-lists.pdfVIP

The BNC/COCA word family lists (17 September 2012) The BNC/COCA word family lists consist of 29 word family lists. Twenty-five of the lists contain word families based on frequency and range data. The four additional lists are (1) an ever-growing list of proper names, (2) a list of marginal words including swear words, exclamations, and letters of the alphabet, (3) a list of transparent compounds, and (4) a list of abbreviations. In the lists for AntWordProfiler, each list has a name which describes its content. In the lists for Range, because of the requirements of the Range program, each list has a fixed name – basewrdx.txt, where x is a number. Basewrd26-30 just contain one nonsense word each. They were made to provide space for additional lists and to avoid having to keep changing the names of the proper nouns etc lists. Basewrd31 contains proper nouns, basewrd32 marginal words, basewrd33 transparent compounds and basewrd34 abbreviations. More detail on these additional lists can found in Nation and Webb (2011: Chapter 8). The lists are saved in UTF-8, without BOM (choose under Encoding in Notepad ++). The making of the lists The 1 st 1000 and 2 nd 1000 word family lists The first two 1000 word family lists were made using a specially designed 10 million token corpus. Six million tokens of this corpus were spoken English from both British and American English (see Corpus/PN corpus for 2000) as well as movies and TV programs. The written sections included texts for young children and fiction (see Table 1). Table 1: The corpus used for the first two 1000 word family lists US UK/NZ Spoken 1 AmNC spoken face to face, telephone 1 1,107,602 4 BNC 1 1,036,097 2 AmNC spoken face to face, telephone 2 1,029,831 5 BNC 2 1,125,523 3 Movies and TV 1.000,000 6 BNC Plus half of WSC 1,132,620 Written 7 AmNC written fiction, letters 1 1,145,081 9 School journals 1,028,842 8 AmNC written fiction, letters 2 939,407