davies-linguistics.byu.eduMark Davies, Professor of (Corpus) Linguistics, Brigham Young University (BYU)

Mark Davies Professor of Linguistics Brigham Young University Overview I am a professor of Linguistics at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, USA. My primary areas of research are corpus linguistics, language change and genre-based variation, the design and optimization of linguistic databases, and frequency and collocational analyses (all for English, Spanish, and Portuguese). Please feel free to take a look at my CV , to see what activities I've been involved with (see also my Google Scholar entry). But perhaps the best thing would be to simply try out some of the corpora that I've created , which are probably the most widely used corpora in existence. Education I received a B.A. from Brigham Young University in 1986 with a double major in Linguistics and Spanish , which was followed by an M.A. in Spanish Linguistics from BYU in 1989. I then received a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 1992, with a specialization in "Ibero-Romance Linguistics". Research ( see CV ) As a professor of Spanish at Illinois State University (1992-2003), most of my publications dealt with historical and genre-based variation in Spanish and Portuguese syntax. Since coming to BYU in 2003, however, my research has 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 six books and more than seventy articles , I have given numerous (invited) presentations at international conferences. One evidence of the impact of this research is that I was invited to write the introductory chapter for the recent Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics (2015). Awards In the 2015-16 academic year, I received the Karl G. Maeser Research and Creative Arts Award at BYU, 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 August 2017 I was given the Creative Works Award at BYU, 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 at BYU (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. Teaching In Winter 2020 I'm teaching English Grammar (ELang 325) and the Senior Seminar (LING/ELANG 495), dealing with "A Corpus-based Approach to the History of American English". Other recent classes include Historical and Comparative Linguistics (LING 450), Corpus Linguistics (LING 485R), and a class on "Creating Corpora" with Earl Brown. TV and Movie corpora (2019) These are the most informal of all of the BYU corpora. 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 language (even more informal than actual spoken corpora like the BNC-Spoken), the corpora also allow you to look at change over time, as well as between dialects. ( More infomation ) iWeb Corpus (2018) iWeb is the largest corpus that we've ever created -- 14 billion words, which is nearly 25 times the size of COCA. (And yet it's still as fast as any other corpus, due to its advanced architecture.) The corpus allows users to browse through the top 60,000 words in the corpus (including by pronunciation), and for each of these words you can see a wealth of information -- much of which is not available for any of the other BYU corpora (including links to pronunciation, images, videos, and translations). iWeb is perhaps the most innovative and learner-friendly corpus that we've ever created. ( More information ; also available in Chinese ) Early English Books Online (2017) Part of the SAMUELS project and funded by the AHRC (UK). This corpus contains 755 million words in more than 25,000 texts from the 1470s to the 1690s. The corpus provides many types of searches than are not available from other EEBO corpora online. Corpus of US Supreme Court Opinions (2017) This corpus contains approximately 130 million words in 32,000 Supreme Court decisions from the 1790s to the current time. This allows users to see how words and phrases have been used in a legal context since that time. This corpus is related to other activities and projects that use corpora to look at legal questions . NOW corpus ("News on the Web") (2016) The corpus automatically grows by about 100-130 million words each month (or about 1.3 billion words each year). So when people search the NOW corpus, the data will be current as of no more than 30 days ago , which should be useful for research that would benefit from up-to-date corpora (i.e. no excuse to be limited to stale corpora from 20-25 years ago). CORE corpus (Corpus of Online Registers of English) (2016) Douglas Biber , Jesse Egbert , and I received a grant from the US National Science Foundation to create " A Linguistic Taxonomy of English Web Registers ", and this corpus is the result of that research (see also articles 1 , 2 , and our 2017 book on "web registers" from Cambridge University Press). The corpus contains more than 50 million words of text from the web, and it is the first large web-based corpus that is so carefully categorized into so many different registers . This is quite different from other very large corpora that simply present huge amounts of data from web pages as giant "blobs", with no real attempt to categorize them into linguistically distinct registers. New corpus interface (2016) The new corpus interface has the following improvements and enhances over the interface that had been used since 2008: 1) it now works great with mobile devices as well 2) cleaner, simpler interface 3) more helpful help files 4) simpler, more intuitive search syntax. It also allows users to easily and quickly create and use "virtual corpora" [VC] (e.g. texts from a particular magazine, or related to a particular concept), and then search within the VC, compare frequency across different VC, and quickly generate keyword lists from the virtual corpus. Billion word extensions to the Spanish and Portuguese corpora (2015-2007) In early 2015 I was awarded (see p37) a two year grant from the US National Endowment for the Humanities to create much larger, updated versions of the Corpus del Español and the Corpus do Português . The Corpus del Español will be 100 times as large as before (two billion words, compared to 20 million words for the 1900s) and the Corpus do Português will be 50 times as big as before (one billion words, compared to 20...