1. Introduction
Corpus of Contemporary American English (Corpus of Contemporary American English) was developed by Professor Mark Davie of Brigham Young University, the latest contemporary English monolingual corpus in the United States, which is the largest English parallel corpus in the world today. Official website: https://www.english-corpora.org/coca
2. Detailed page explanation
2.1 Main Page
List: List view
Chart: Used to compare the frequency of search terms in five domains and over different time periods
Collocates: Used to study word collocations
Compare: Used to compare the collocation of two words, studying how they differ in meaning and usage
KWIC: Keyword In Context, which studies the use of search terms by sorting several words on the left or right adjacent to the search term
2.2 Advanced Features
Sections: Conditional search, the ability to specify the time period to be retrieved, etc
Texts/Virtual: Create your own corpus based on corpus within COCA
Sort/Limit: Set the result collation, which can be sorted by frequency, relevance, and English alphabet. Set the minimum frequency and minimum mutual information value
Options: Additional settings
3. Search function
Select the "List" column under the "Search" page and search in the search box, using the word "expect" as an example:
After entering, click "Find matching strings" to jump to the "Frequency" page, as shown in the following figure ⬇
Click the "expect" entry on this page to jump to the "Context" page to view the context in which the entry appears; Then click on any abbreviation on the page to see the detailed context. As shown in the following figure ⬇
4. Chart function
Select the "Chart" column under the "Search" page to search, you can visually count the word frequency of the retrieved terms in different styles and different years through the bar chart, which is conducive to the more appropriate use of the search term. As shown in the following figure ⬇
Note: ACAD: Academic Journal; BLOG: Blog; FIC: Fiction; MAG: Magazine; NEWS: News; SPOK: colloquial; WEB: The website
5. Collocates function
There are two search bars under the Collocates feature:
- Word/phrase: Type the core words in the phrase here
- Collocates: Type the collocation preposition, article, etc., if you don't know which preposition or article should be matched after the core word, or want to qualify the part of speech for search, you can type the part of speech you want to qualify in [POS] (Part of Speech) after the two search bars
Taking the word "expect" as an example, if you want to retrieve the prepositions used in the last two words of expect, you can do the following:
1. Type "expect" in the "Word/phrase" search bar;
2. Type "_i*" in the "Collocates" search bar to indicate the combination of query and preposition, if you want to query the noun, replace the "i" with "n", and the other parts of speech are the same; Note: Individual parts of speech rules: noun: [n*]; Verb: [v*]; Adjective: [j*]; Adverbs: [r*]; Pronouns: [p*]; Conjunction: [c*].
3. Select in the number section below the search bar;
4. Click "Find collocates" to search, and the use of prepositions paired with expect will be displayed on the "Frequency" page of the jump, see the figure below ⬇
Some words do not have only one part of speech, such as look, if you want to retrieve its collocation as a noun, type "look" in the "Word/phrase" search bar, and then add an English period, square brackets, and enter the part of speech in square brackets, that is, "look. [n*]”。
6. Compare function
When comparing two synonyms or synonyms, but don't know how they fit together, you can use the Compare feature, such as comparing which verbs work and job are paired with.
Type "work" and "job" in the two search bars, type the verb part of speech in the "collocates" section, and adjust the number part, see the figure below ⬇;
After clicking "Compare words", the result will be displayed on the "Frequency" page that jumps
where "W1" indicates the frequency of a verb paired with "work"; "W2" indicates the frequency of a verb paired with "job"; The table on the right is the opposite
You can see the result on the jumped "WORD" page as shown below ⬇
7. Browse function
(1) Under the "Browse" page, you can query the usage, ranking, part of speech and other information of the terms. Also take "look" as an example:
Click "Browse" under the "Search" page to enter this page, see the figure below ⬇
The search results are as follows ⬇:
(2) Under the "Browse" page, you can query the words that start or end with a certain prefix or suffix, take "-ism" as an example, see the following figure ⬇:
Note: Don't forget to enter "*", "*" here for all words ending in "-ism"
The search results are as follows ⬇:
(3) Under the "Browse" page, you can query the usage ranking of words in the range of 60,000 words, for example, enter "1-500" in the "Range" search bar, you can query which words are the top 500 commonly used in the thesaurus, see the figure below ⬇:
The search results are as follows ⬇:
8. KWIC function
KWIC (Keyword in Context), also known as Concordance, is centered on the search term, and you can see the context in which the search term is located and some parts of speech. Take "expect" as an example:
The search results are as follows ⬇:
Note: Different colors represent different parts of speech. Blue: noun; purple: verb; Green: adjective; Brown: adverb; Gray: pronouns; Yellow: Preposition.
9. Wildcard use
(1) For example, if you want to search for the verbs before organization, you can enter "[*v] organization" in the search bar on the "SEARCH" page. (* can replace any number of letters)
On the redirected page, you can see how often the verb with "organization" is used, and the search results are as follows ⬇:
Similarly, if you want to query other parts of speech with collocation, the rules for parts of speech are the same as those used in "Collocates function".
(2) Search synonyms: Enter "[=develop]" in the search bar, indicating and developing all adjectives with detailed meaning:
If you want to query for a similar phrase that is paired with "a strategy" and has a similar meaning to "develop a strategy", the same is true, enter "[=develop] a strategy" in the search bar to get the result. See the image below ⬇:
(3) If you want to query a certain part of speech with some letters, for example, to query all forms of all adjectives starting with un- and ending with -ed, enter "un*ed.[*j]" to query (. [*j] indicates that the part of speech is an adjective). See figure below ⬇
(4) If you want to query all phrases of verb + any word + ground, enter "[vv*] * [ground]" in the search bar to get the result (there is a space between the square brackets).
The former is used to query vocabulary, and the latter is used to query specific parts of speech
(5) If you want to search for any word that starts with s and the third letter is n, you can enter "s?n*" to search. (?can replace a letter)
This is the end of this sharing issue, I hope you can gain something through this sharing~
Special note: This article is only for learning and communication, if there is any inappropriate, please contact the editor in the background.
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Translation Technology Education and Research - The Search and Translation Task Force is committed to popularizing the concept of search business, promoting search resources, disseminating search methods, and making search a habit of every translator, so as to improve the work efficiency of translators. At present, the main direction of the task force is to explore search resources, search content, search skills, information screening, text manipulation, fragmentation knowledge management and other related knowledge. Under the guidance of teachers, group members determine topics through regular meetings and discussions, and share the results of their exploration in the form of tweets. Everyone is welcome to leave a message and provide constructive comments to the search translation task force!
Original author: Tian Beixi
Tweet editor: Jia Rui