Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. Vol. 1. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 24)

Ramesh Krishnamurthy: Change and continuity at COBUILD (1986-1996)

(especially if those concordances were being used by another lexicographer, or had been lost or misplaced). In 1986, each lexicographer was supplied with a set of all the concordances on microfiche, and this made such searches much easier. Fiches were less easy to misplace, lose, or damage. The fiches also added data from the 20 million word corpus, but only for words of lower frequency in the 7.3 million word corpus. Also in 1986, a one million word corpus was made available online. This automatically provided longer contexts and the facility to re-sort concordance lines by the word to the left of the keyword. 3.2 Lookup The 1996 Bank of English corpus is always used online (although printouts can, of course, still be obtained if needed) and has a tremendous array of display options. All the main access and retrieval facilities are integrated into a single computer program called 'lookup'. 3.2.1 Frequency And Subcorpus Distribution The 211 million word corpus is held as 16 subcorpora. So whenever we investigate a word or phrase, 'lookup' first gives us some information about frequency and subcorpus distribution. This enables us to see whether a word is more commonly used in speech or writing, in British or American English, and so on. For example, here are the figures for 'actually' (see Appendix for an explanation and description of the subcorpora) : Corpus Total Number of Average Number per Occurrences Million Words spoken npr bbc scbooks mags american britbooks guardian newsci indy 21131 6704 3944 763 5220 3360 4026 1449 429 490 1360.5/million 301.1/million 210.7/million 190.9/million 173.2/million 172.8/million 168.1/million 115.0/million 102.7/million 97.3/million 65