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■BNC=The British National Corpus 英国国家语料库

■http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/（BNC网址，点击进入） 

■http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/ （BNC网址，点击进入）

英语国家语料库（British National Corpus，简称BNC）是目前网络可直接使用的最大的语料库，它是英国牛津出版社﹑朗文出版公司﹑钱伯斯—哈洛普出版公司﹑牛津大学计算机服务中心、兰卡斯特大学英语计算机中心以及大英图书馆等联合开发建立的大型语料库，于1994年完成。

英国国家语料库（BNC）是一个以来源广泛的书面语言和口语为样本，收录了1亿字的电子资源，用以呈现20世纪后期以来的英式英语，涉及口语和书面英语。该语料库书面语与口语并存，词容量超过一亿，由4124篇代表广泛的现代英式英语文本构成。其中书面语占90%，口语占10%。BNC最新版是BNC XML 2007。它采用国际通用标准化标注体系SGML，使用三级赋码标注，使标注错误率由3%减少到1%。在应用方面，该语料库既可用其配套的SARA检索软件，也可支持多种通用检索软件，并可直接进行在线检索。

■What is the BNC?

The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of British English from the later part of the 20th century, both spoken and written. The latest edition is the BNC XML Edition, released in 2007.

The written part of the BNC (90%) includes, for example, extracts from regional and national newspapers, specialist periodicals and journals for all ages and interests, academic books and popular fiction, published and unpublished letters and memoranda, school and university essays, among many other kinds of text. The spoken part (10%) consists of orthographic transcriptions of unscripted informal conversations (recorded by volunteers selected from different age, region and social classes in a demographically balanced way) and spoken language collected in different contexts, ranging from formal business or government meetings to radio shows and phone-ins.

The corpus is encoded according to the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) to represent both the output from CLAWS (automatic part-of-speech tagger) and a variety of other structural properties of texts (e.g. headings, paragraphs, lists etc.). Full classification, contextual and bibliographic information is also included with each text in the form of a TEI-conformant header.

Work on building the corpus began in 1991, and was completed in 1994. No new texts have been added after the completion of the project but the corpus was slightly revised prior to the release of the second edition BNC World (2001) and the third edition BNC XML Edition (2007). Since the completion of the project, two sub-corpora with material from the BNC have been released separately: the BNC Sampler (a general collection of one million written words, one million spoken) and the BNC Baby (four one-million word samples from four different genres).

Full technical documentation covering all aspects of the BNC including its design, markup, and contents are provided by the Reference Guide for the British National Corpus (XML Edition). For earlier versions of the Reference Guide and other documentation, see the BNC Archive page.

■What sort of corpus is the BNC?

Monolingual: It deals with modern British English, not other languages used in Britain. However non-British English and foreign language words do occur in the corpus.

Synchronic: It covers British English of the late twentieth century, rather than the historical development which produced it.

General: It includes many different styles and varieties, and is not limited to any particular subject field, genre or register. In particular, it contains examples of both spoken and written language.

Sample: For written sources, samples of 45,000 words are taken from various parts of single-author texts. Shorter texts up to a maximum of 45,000 words, or multi-author texts such as magazines and newspapers, are included in full. Sampling allows for a wider coverage of texts within the 100 million limit, and avoids over-representing idiosyncratic texts.

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