The International Corpus of English (ICE)

Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,0, University of Bamberg, course: Proseminar: Corpus Linguistics, 17 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: This paper deals with the International Corpus of English (ICE), which is an international project that was initiated by Professor Sidney Greenbaum in 1988. His book'Comparing English Worldwide'has been a very helpful resource for writing this paper. Many countries and people have been - and still are presently - involved in the research and compilation of corpora. It is the corpora of eighteen countries from all over the world that make up the International Corpus of English. The paper gives information on the design and structure of the International Corpus, in general and in depth, with focus on the division into a written and spoken category of texts. The paper mainly talks about what the corpora of the ICE have in common and not so much about the individual differences among them. Furthermore, the paper explains the theoretical given facts of text categories and the two different ways this particular corpus was annotated: textual and biographical/bibliographical markup. Last but not least, one will briefly learn about the ICE Corpus Utility Program, which was especially developed in order to simplify the analysis of and ease the access to the ICE.