Largest Web-based, Genre-balanced English Corpus (COCA): A Tutorial and Suggestions for Classroom Use
Corpus of Contemporary American English was released on the web in 2008 with more than 400 million words of corpus, the largest free web-based corpus. However, what makes this corpus special is not its enormous size but its : 1- genre-balanced search ability , as you can look up the word or collocation in any genre available ( or in all) and compare between spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic, or even between sub-genres (or domains), such as movie scripts, sports magazines, newspaper editorial, or scientific journals 2- over time search, as you can compare different years from 1990 to the present time 3- “.. semantically-based queries of the corpus. For example, you can contrast and compare the collocates of two related words ( little/small , democrats/republicans , men/women ), to determine the difference in meaning or use between these words [ also how each is used in different genres]” 4- interface, as you can easily conduct searches between all genr...