Corpora and Cultural Studies

It is only recently that the role of a corpus in telling us about culture has really begun to be explored. After the completion of the LOB corpus of British English, one of the earliest pieces of work to be carried out was a comparison of its vocabulary with the vocabulary of the American Brown corpus (Hofland and Johansson 1982). This revealed interesting differences which went beyond the purely linguistic ones such as spelling (colour/color) or morphology (got/gotten).

Leech and Fallon (1992) used the results of these earlier studies, along with KWIC concordances of the two corpora to check up on the senses in which words were being used. They then grouped the differences which were statistically significant into fifteen broad categories. The frequencies of concepts in these categories revealed differences between the two countries which were primarily of cultural, not linguistic difference. For example - travel words were more frequent in American English than British English, perhaps suggestive of the larger size of the United States. Words in the domains of crime and the military were also more common in the American data, as was "violent crime" in the crime category, perhaps suggestive of the American "gun culture". In general, the findings seemed to suggest a picture of American culture at the time of the two corpora (1961) that was more macho and dynamic than British culture. Although this work is in its infancy and requires methodological refinement, it seems to be an interesting and promising area of study, which could also integrate more closely work in language learning with that in national cultural studies.