[About the Workshop on Online Corpora by Mark Davies (Brigham Young University)]

In this workshop, we will provide extensive hands-on experience in using the following corpora, all of which are freely available from http://corpus.byu.edu/:

-- Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA); 450 million words, 1990-2012
-- Corpus of Historical American English (COHA); 400 million words, 1810-2009
-- BYU-BNC; our interface to the 100 million word British National Corpus
-- Corpus of Web-based Global English (to be released in May 2013); 2 *billion* words from 20 different countries
-- BYU/Advanced Google Books; 155 billion words, 1500s-2000s

The linguistic phenomena that we will consider cover a wide range of lexical, syntactic, morphological, and semantic issues, involving the following types of variation and change:

-- Recent changes in American English (COCA)
-- Changes over the past 200 years (COHA and Google Books)
-- Dialectal variation in English (COCA/BNC and Web-Based Global English)
-- Genre-based variation (mostly COCA)

We will also consider how these corpora can be used for teaching and learning, including the student-oriented, COCA-based www.WordAndPhrase.info. Finally, we will consider how a great deal of COCA-derived data can be used offline, such as the information from www.wordfrequency.info and www.ngrams.info.?