Response to Davies and Fuchs

Abstract

The Global Web-based English Corpus (GloWbE) introduced to EWW readers in Davies and Fuchs's focus article is an outstanding addition to the corpora of the English-speaking/English-using world -by its sheer size and up-to-dateness, and especially its inclusion of 14 "new Englishes" and six "core Englishes" (i.e. both indigenized and settler varieties, in Schneider's (2007) terminology). 1 Its 1.9 billion words come from 340,000 websites and blogs with the relevant regional suffixes, which were also carefully checked for other indicators of regionality. The validity of using internet data to represent regional varieties of English has been demonstrated by Cook and Hirst (2012), in relation to Canadian and British English, and the new GloWbE corpus takes this a quantum leap further. It will be an invaluable reference resource for mapping new varieties of English whose norms are still evolving (Hundt and Gut 2012).GloWbE's concentration on web-based discourse serves a number of purposes. It creates a repository of an English-language medium not represented in any of the existing standard corpora (Corpus of Contemporary American English, COCA; British National Corpus, BNC). It provides a vast body of English language data from the second decade of the 21st century. Because this web-based material consists largely of unrestricted websites and blogs, it is not entangled by the copyright law (Androutsopoulos 2014) operative in some English-speaking countries, and GloWbE makes it freely available to bona fide researchers. This includes researchers outside linguistics, e.g. psychologists and speech pathologists seeking English norms for literacy and language competence. The Brown Corpus from the 1960s has too long served as the benchmark for assessment and diagnostic purposes (Brysbaert and New 2009), apart from its limitations in terms of the medium/genres it represents (published writing only).The GloWbE corpus consists of blogs (60 per cent) and websites (40 per cent), housing a mix of internet genres and text-types. In fact, both source types contain a mix of material, since the blogs written by individuals may contain or link to texts from institutional websites elsewhere. Blogs would nevertheless contain more material which has not undergone professional editing, and thus reflect the less generically constrained frontiers of the local variety. Meanwhile websites managed by institutions naturally contain more professionally edited material, 1. Davies and Fuchs's term "core" Englishes reflects Kachru's (1985) three-circles model of World English, though not his terminology ("inner circle" Englishes).

ICE vs GloWbE: Big data and corpus compilation

“…However, the same search in the spoken component of several ICE corpora showed that the frequency of these items was much higher in this corpus than in GloWbE. Hence, the working hypothesis has been that, though blogs are partly oral and informal, there is no substitute for actual conversation (as implied by Mair : 30–1 and Peters : 42).…”

The International Corpus of English project: A progress report

“…Perhaps the most major change of contents for second generation corpora is the recommendation for the inclusion of a new component of electronic texts, totalling up to 500,000 words, making the total maximum size of a second generation corpus 1.5 million words. Indeed, from her thorough comprehensive comparison between ICE and the GloWbE corpus of blogs and websites (Davies, ), Loureiro‐Porto (, p. 468) concludes that ‘the future of ICE should include web registers alongside the text types included so far’; from other comparisons, similar conclusions are drawn by Mair (), Mukherjee (), Nelson () and Peters (), in their responses to Davies and Fuchs (). A list of possible electronic texts is presented in Appendix 3 for discussion.…”

“…The issue of sampling was also raised. (2015), Mukherjee (2015), Nelson (2015) and Peters (2015), in their responses to Davies and Fuchs (2015). A list of possible electronic texts is presented in Appendix 3 for discussion.…”

A corpus‐based approach to Chinese English lexis

“…Just as Davies and Fuchs have admitted, ‘regarding genre, of course GloWbE simply represents whatever is found on the web, and therefore it may include very little from certain genres’ (Davies & Fuchs, 2015a, p. 45). In terms of text source, ‘ all subcopora [of GloWbE] constitute representative samples of how these national varieties of English are used in web‐based communication’ (Davies & Fuchs, 2015b, p. 4), but it still remains unclear how far the web‐based discourse could represent characteristics of a prototypical average speaker of each variety (Cook & Hirst, 2012; Loureiro‐Porto, 2017; Peter, 2015), how much internet language should each linguistic variety be comprising, and to what extent is blogging discourse resembling spontaneous and authentic conversation (Mair, 2015; Peter, 2015).…”