Corpus design criteria

Abstract

'Corpus Design Criteria' beings (Section 1) by defining the object to be created, a corpus, and the constituents of it, texts themselves, noting briefly the pragmatic constraints on the sort of documents which will actually be available, spoken as well as written.It then (Section 2) reviews the practical stages in the process of establishing a corpus, from selection of sources through to mark-up, assigning annotations to the texts assembled. This is followed by a consideration of copyright problems (Section 3).Section 4 points out the major difficulties in defining the population of texts that the corpus will sample, contrasting the sets of texts received versus those produced by a target group, and internal (linguistic) versus external (social) means of defining such groups.The next three sections look at the sets of markers which can be useful at different levels Section 7 begins at the highest level, considering the different types of corpus there may be. Section 6 is intermediate, considering how to distinguish the different types of text occurring within a corpus. Then, for the intra-text level. Section 7 reviews considerations governing mark-up, distinguishing those markers useful for written and spoken texts. Of these three sections. Section 6 is the most fully explicit, listing twenty-nine significant attributes assignable to a text.Sections 8 and 9 turn away from the corpus design itself, to focus on its social context and function, both of the corpus design process, and of the corpus when implemented: to what extent are there now accepted standards relevant to the criteria reviewed in preceding sections? And what are the major classes of potential users and uses for corpora, both now and in the future?. © 1992 Oxford University Press.