Corpus linguistics and the British national corpus.

Leech, Geoffrey (2000) Corpus linguistics and the British national corpus. English Corpus Studies, 7. pp. 1-20.

Abstract

I am delighted to have the opportunity to visit this Association for the first time. As far as 1 know, the Japan Association of English Corpus Linguistics is the only national association for corpus linguistics in the world. So it's a special occasion for me to learn how corpus linguistics has developed in Japan over the years. 1 feel quite old in this company actually, because 1 began working on corpus linguistics (although the term was not used at that time) in 1970. So I'd like to begin with a glance back into the ancient history of corpus linguistics. When 1 say 'ancient history', 1 don't really mean ancient history. According to Graeme Kennedy, who has addressed this Association, corpus linguistics goes back to the seventeenth century (Kennedy 1998: 14). That was before there were any computers. But after computers were invented, there was a new generation of corpus linguistics beginning in the 1960s--and that is already ancient history in 1999. So what 1 am going to do then is to give you a historical sketch from the point of view of my own experience. Then I'm going to concentrate on the British National Corpus, a corpus of 100 million words which I was involved in during the earlier 1990s, and then use that as a platform for discussing the future of English language corpora.