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CANELC: constructing an e-language corpus

Knight, Dawn; Adolphs, Svenja; Carter, Ronald

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Authors

Dawn Knight

SVENJA ADOLPHS SVENJA.ADOLPHS@NOTTINGHAM.AC.UK
Professor of English Language and Linguistics

Ronald Carter



Abstract

This paper reports on the construction of CANELC: the Cambridge and Nottingham e-language Corpus.3 CANELC is a one million word corpus of digital communication in English, taken from online discussion boards, blogs, tweets, emails and SMS messages. The paper outlines the approaches used when planning the corpus: obtaining consent; collecting the data and compiling the corpus database.

This is followed by a detailed analysis of some of the patterns of language used in the corpus. The analysis includes a discussion of the key words and phrases used as well as the common themes and semantic associations connected with the data. These discussions form the basis of an investigation of how e-language operates in both similar and different ways to spoken and written records of communication (as evidenced by the BNC - British National Corpus).

3 CANELC stands for Cambridge and Nottingham e-language Corpus. This corpus has been built as part of a collaborative project between The University of Nottingham and Cambridge University Press with whom sole copyright of the annotated corpus resides. CANELC comprises one-million words of digital English taken from SMS messages, blogs, tweets, discussion board content and private/business emails. Plans to extend the corpus are under discussion. The legal dimension to corpus ‘ownership’ of some forms of unannotated data is a complex one and is under constant review. At the present time the annotated corpus is only available to authors and researchers working for CUP and is not more generally available.

Citation

Knight, D., Adolphs, S., & Carter, R. (2014). CANELC: constructing an e-language corpus. Corpora, 9(1), https://doi.org/10.3366/cor.2014.0050

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date May 1, 2013
Publication Date May 1, 2014
Deposit Date Sep 1, 2016
Publicly Available Date Sep 1, 2016
Journal Corpora
Print ISSN 1749-5032
Electronic ISSN 1755-1676
Publisher Edinburgh University Press
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 9
Issue 1
DOI https://doi.org/10.3366/cor.2014.0050
Keywords Blogs, Tweets, SMS, Discussion boards, e-language, Corpus linguistics
Public URL https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/995856
Publisher URL http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/cor.2014.0050
Related Public URLs http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/cor.2014.0050
Additional Information This article has been accepted for publication by Edinburgh University Press in Corpora. Copyright © 2016. Edinburgh University Press.
Contract Date Sep 1, 2016

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