38 Managing Synchronic Corpus Data with the British National Corpus (BNC)

This chapter discusses data management and preparation issues that would arise in a fictitious corpus study using data from the British National Corpus World XML edition (BNC; BNC Consortium 2001); for overview and discussion of corpus linguistics as a field and its relation to notions such as theory and method, see the 2010 special issue of the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics (Pope 2010) and McEnery and Hardie (2011). This corpus consists of approximately 100 million words—4,049 files with 10 million words from spoken and 90 million words from written data—that were compiled to represent British English of the 1980s and is by now downloadable for free from the Oxford Text Archive (http://ota.ox.ac.uk /desc/2554). Specifically, for this chapter, I am discussing a hypothetical study of the so-called dative alternation between a ditransitive construction as in (1a) and the often-available prepositional dative with to in (1b); we will restrict our attention to sentences in the active voice.