8

There are many different corpora[1] for the English language:

However, one may want to do an analysis of the evolution of English as used in written academic works (theses, journal articles, etc.). This came apparent to me while I was trying to research usage of passive vs. active voice for this question.

So, are there any available corpora of academic works in English language?


  1. corpus: collections of written or spoken material in machine-readable form, assembled for the purpose of studying linguistic structures, frequencies, etc. [New Oxford American Dictionary]

3 Answers 3

8

Yes, JSTOR provides a corpus for linguistic (and other) analyses of academic literature, at JSTOR Data for Research

See this Language Log discussion of one such analysis done on that corpus.

5

Someone will no doubt provide a better answer for you, but here are a couple of resources that may be of interest/help/use:

"Applying corpus methods to written academic texts: Explorations of MICUSP" (Romer and Wulff, 2010).

"Looking at citations: Using corpora in English for Academic Purposes" (Thompson, 2001)

3

I'll self answer, because I realized just now that COCA (The Corpus of Contemporary American English) actually includes academic texts (a subpart of the corpus they refer to as COCA-Academic). It even allows one to search by section, for example restricting the search to academic works:

    enter image description here

(and it was right under my nose the whole time!)

1
  • that is usually where you'll find what you're after.
    – user7130
    Sep 14, 2013 at 11:10

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