Issues of corpus comparability and register variation in the International Corpus of English: Theories and computer applications

Dissertation, Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, 2020

This study offers an account of the issue of corpus comparability of components of the International Corpus of English (ICE). By employing quantitative and qualitative methods, it contributes to corpus-based studies of varieties of English, and corpus linguistics as a linguistic discipline more generally. Specifically, it (i) exemplifies how discrepancies in sampling strategies can decrease the comparability of components of comparable corpus families such as ICE, (ii) presents methods to detect such discrepancies, (iii) develops and releases a user-friendly computer program (ICEtree) that allows the application of these methods to components of ICE that are not investigated in this study and (iv) illustrates how a register-based annotation framework could help mitigate some of the conflicting priorities in the use and compilation of comparable corpora.