davies-linguistics.byu.eduMark Davies, Professor of (Corpus) Linguistics

Mark Davies Professor of Linguistics Overview In 2020 I " retired " from Brigham Young University (BYU), where I was a professor of linguistics. My primary areas of research were corpus linguistics, language change and genre-based variation, the design and optimization of linguistic databases, and frequency analyses (all for English, Spanish, and Portuguese). Please feel free to take a look at my CV , a list of my publications (all downloadable), or my Google Scholar profile ( more ). But perhaps the best thing would be to simply try out some of the corpora that I’ve created ( English , Spanish , Portuguese ), which I continue to add to and enhance. These corpora are the most widely used corpora in existence, and the corpus architecture and interface (which I designed myself) offer many advantages to other large online corpora in terms of speed , search types , collocates and related topics , analyzing entire texts , word sketches , Virtual Corpora , language learning and teaching , the ability to analyze variation (historical, dialectal, and genre-based), and much more . Education I received a B.A. in 1986 with a double major in Linguistics and Spanish, which was followed by an M.A. in Spanish Linguistics in 1989. I then received a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 1992, with a specialization in "Ibero-Romance Linguistics (a fancy term for Spanish and Portuguese linguistics). Research CV Publications (downloadable articles) As a professor of Spanish at Illinois State University from 1992-2003, most of my publications dealt with historical and genre-based variation in Spanish and Portuguese syntax. I then taught at Brigham Young University (BYU) from 2003-2020, where my research dealt primarily with general issues in corpus design, creation, and use (especially with regards to English), as well as word frequency. Overall, I have published 6 books and more than 85 articles , and I have given numerous presentations at international conferences (with many of them being keynote / plenary talks). Awards In 2015 I received the Karl G. Maeser Research and Creative Arts Award , which recognizes achievements in research. This award is given each year to only two or three people from the 1,500+ full-time faculty members at BYU, and it had not been given to anyone else in the College of Humanities since 2007. In 2017 I was given the Creative Works Award, which is given to one person each year, who "demonstrates outstanding achievement in the development of creative works that have had wide acceptance and distribution nationally or internationally ." I have also received several awards from the College of Humanities (approx 200 faculty members ), including the Barker lectureship, a two-year College Professorship, and two terms (two years + three years) as a Fellow for the Humanities Center . Grants I have received six large federal grants to create and analyze corpora. These include four from the National Endowment for the Humanities : 2001-02 (to create a large corpus of historical Spanish ), 2004-2006 (to create a large corpus of historical Portuguese , with Michael Ferreira ), 2009-2011 (to create a large corpus of historical English ), and 2015-2017 (to enlarge the Spanish and Portuguese corpora ). The two grants from the National Science Foundation were in 2002-2004 (to examine genre-based variation in Spanish , with Douglas Biber ) and 2013-2016 (to examine " web-genres ", with Douglas Biber and Jesse Egbert ). In addition to these six US-based grants, I have had a large subcontract for a grant from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (2014-2016; to create the architecture and web interface for large semantically-tagged corpora ). I am also a co-PI for a grant from the Korea Research Foundation (2014-2017, with Jong-Bok Kim ) to examine three related syntactic constructions in English from a corpus-based perspective. See below for more information on these projects. Detailed training and documentation (all corpora) (2023-24) In the last two years or so, I have added several detailed PDF help files: overview / guided tour , architecture , association measures , collocates (cf Sketch Engine) , topics (and collocates) , word sketches , browsing words , analyzing texts , KWIC - analyze text , saved words and phrases , saving KWIC entries , customized word lists , search history , external resources , monitor corpus , Virtual Corpora , Virtual Corpora: quick overview . I have also added several detailed instructional videos: overview , language learning and teaching , word sketches , browsing words , analyze texts , search history , customized word lists , saved words (favorites) , KWIC lines: limiting and sorting , saved KWIC lines , analyze KWIC lines , external resources , Virtual Corpora , examining recent change . The NOW Corpus as a monitor corpus (2022) As of March 2022, it is possible to find daily keywords in the NOW Corpus (15.9+ billion words as of September 2022, and growing by about 200-220 million words each month). This is useful to research current events like the invasion of Ukraineor any other current event. It is now also possible to quickly and easily search the NOW Corpus by year, and then month, and then day - something that no other large corpus offers. Spanish and Portuguese corpora (2021) A number of new features were added to the Corpus del Español and the Corpus do Português . These include the ability to browse and search through the top 40,000 words in the language, and to see detailed information on each word (frequency and distribution, definition, translation to 100+ languages, images, videos, pronunciation, synonyms, collocates, related topics, concordance lines, etc). Users can now import entire texts, and analyze the texts to find keywords, see detailed information on each word in the text, and quickly and easily search for related phrases in the corpora. COCA (Analyze Texts) (2020) In COCA, users can now analyze entire texts (e.g. student compositions or online newspaper articles) using COCA data. They can find keywords in their texts, and can click on any word in the text to see a wide range of information (definition, pronunciation, images, videos, synonyms, related words, collocates and related topics, clusters, concordances, etc). They can also quickly and easily find phrases in COCA that are related to phrases in their text, which allows them to find "just the right phrase" to express a given concept. Coronavirus Corpus (2020) 1.5 billion words of data in almost 1.9 million texts from Jan 2020 - Dec 2022. The corpus is designed to be the definitive record of the social, cultural, and economic impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) in 2020 and beyond. All corpora (2020) The frequency-based data from all of the corpora is now linked to a wide range of external resources, including searches of the web, images, and billions of words of books; videos from YouGlish; and translations of the corpus phrases in many different languages. All of this leverages the power of the most powerful and widely-used corpora in the world with huge amounts of data from other sources. COCA 2020 (2020) The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is probably the most widely-used corpus throughout the world, and the only corpus that is 1) large 2) recent and 3) has texts from a wide range of genres. In early 2020, it was nearly doubled in size (to one billion words), it now includes texts through Dec 2019, and it now includes three new genres (blogs, other web pages, and TV/Movies subtitles). In addition, the "word-oriented" pages (see iWeb below) are now available for COCA as well. ( More information ) TV and Movie corpora (2019) These are the most informal of all of the corpora from English-Corpora.org. The TV Corpus has 325 million words in 75,000 TV scripts (comedies and dramas) from 1950-2018 and the Movie Corpus has 200 million words in 25,000 scripts from 1930-2018. In addition to having extremely informal...