BNC Corpus: How to use the search tool at http://corpus.byu.

edu/bnc/

Go to: http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/

Or, if you start at http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/ , look in the second big blue box, entitled “Search
the British National Corpus online” and click on the first link to “BYU-BNC”

Using the Corpus

On the left-hand side below SEARCH, there are five options (List, Chart, Collocates, Compare and
Concordances). We will use List which is the default. Now type depend in the text box below List and
click on “Find matching strings” below.
The number next to DEPEND (under “FREQ”) is 3426 – this is the total number of times that depend
occurs in the corpus. Click on DEPEND and you will see a list which starts like this:

This list contains 100 examples of depend (highlighted in aquamarine). There are 3426 examples of
depend and 100 of them are shown to you. They are shown to you in context – in the sentences
from books and newspapers for example which form part of the corpus.

On the left there is also information which looks like this:

1 F7G S_meeting A B C

This information starts with a number (in this case 1), then in the next box are 3 letters/numbers (in
this case F7G), then some abbreviations (in this case “S meeting”).

If you click on this, a page opens which starts like this:

This tells you what the text is and when it was written.

This tells you where the sentence comes from. As you can see, it comes from a Teachers’
conference. It is often useful to know where the sentence comes from. If it is a published book or
article then you know that it has been carefully written and carefully edited. That’s important for us
on this course because we want to be sure that we are using good models – models we can rely on.
Reliable examples.

The British National Corpus contains approximately 100 million words but ten million words of that
is spoken English – like our example from the Teachers’ conference. Now, spoken English is not such
a good guide to written English. In spoken English people make mistakes, they change direction in
the middle of the sentence, they stop and then they start again, they talk in a way that is OK for
talking but not for writing where there are different rules. So remember, if you are using the British
National Corpus to check if a phrase is correct in writing, you need to find evidence in written texts.
We can limit our search to written texts by clicking on “SECTIONS” below “Find matching strings”.

In list 1 select “FICTION”, then hold the “Shift” key and select “MAGAZINE”, “NEWSPAPER”, “NON-
ACAD”, “ACADEMIC” and “MISC”. Now, with depend still in the text box, click “Find matching strings”
again. This will produce a new set of results:

Now there are only 3,257 instances of depend (before there were 3426). This is because we have
eliminated the spoken sections of the corpus, so instances of depend in those sections are not
counted. If you click on DEPEND you will notice that it is also showing a different 100 examples of
depend. And don’t forget that you can also get examples of depends and depended and depending …

Registering
In the top right-hand corner you can click on “Register”; fill in your name, email and password, then
select one of the bottom (pink) category options “Graduate Student”; “Student”; or “Other”.

You are now ready to use the corpus.

Adverts

Occasionally when you enter a search, a light green box with information appears in the box where
the results usually are. Simply wait for a few seconds and a yellow banner will pop up above the
green, click on “carry on with your search” and it will show the results from your query.