The International Corpus of English project: A progress report

Abstract

This article begins by introducing the International Corpus of English project and proceeds to summarize the findings and outcomes of an extensive review by written questionnaire conducted by the present authors (Kirk & Nelson, 2017). Although critically concerned with practice hitherto, the review also discusses possible second generation components, and the issues in need of addressing before they should begin. The report contains many comments from a questionnaire that respondents complete, giving a flavour of the importance with which the corpus is valued. Respondents also raise a number of fundamental questions about the nature of L2 varieties of English in multilingual contexts. An Appendix sets out a prospectus for a possible component of electronic texts. Other Appendices list the corpus's text categories and their quantities as well as the 27 national components and their directors.

Comment markers in world Englishes

“…3 The raw number of tokens investigated in Unuabonah and Gut's (2018) study was 6,409, compared with c.90,000,000 tokens in the present study (the latter number derived by calculating the raw frequency from the pmw total). 4 Discussions have taken place over the preparation of a second generation of ICE corpora, which would provide a diachronic dimension to the ICE collection: see Kirk and Nelson (2018). 5 The term 'pragmaticalisation' was first used by Erman and Kotsinas (1993, p. 79) to denote the development of lexical items into pragmatic markers.…”

“…44Discussions have taken place over the preparation of a second generation of ICE corpora, which would provide a diachronic dimension to the ICE collection: see Kirk and Nelson (2018). …”

Irish English as a World English

“…question which arose during a review of the ICE project (Kirk and Nelson, 2018) was how far the models used for the delineation of world Englishes were adequate to deal with such multilingual environments, or whether they were becoming outmodedsuch as for instance, the Quirkian notion of a "monochrome international standard language" with only local deviations (Quirk et al, 1985, p. 6).…”

Modal verbs of strong obligation in Scottish Standard English

“…We used two components of the International Corpus of English (ICE): ICE-GB (Nelson, Wallis & Aarts 2002;Kirk & Nelson 2018) and ICE-Scotland ('ICE-SCO'; Schützler, Gut & Fuchs 2017). We included material from 21 genres.…”