As a result of the European Union’s pressure towards internationalization, universities in many countries find themselves increasingly urged to provide information on their requirements and services and to promote themselves in English on the web. Hence the need for corpus resources and studies of institutional academic English used as an international language (or lingua franca) on the web. This paper introduces “acWaC-EU” (an acronym for “academic Web-as-Corpus in Europe”), a corpus of web pages in English crawled from the websites of European universities and annotated with contextual metadata. The corpus contains approximately 40 million words from native English universities and a similar number of words from universities based in all other European countries, in which English is used as a lingua franca. Thanks to the metadata, it is possible to re-group texts for comparison based, e.g., on the language family of the native language spoken in the country where the text was produced. The paper describes and evaluates the corpus construction pipeline and the corpus itself, presents a case study on the use of modal and semi-modal verbs in lingua franca vs. native texts, and looks at future developments, in particular as concerns simple heuristics for topic-/genre-oriented subcorpus construction.
The academic Web-as-Corpus
FERRARESI, ADRIANO;BERNARDINI, SILVIA
2013
Abstract
As a result of the European Union’s pressure towards internationalization, universities in many countries find themselves increasingly urged to provide information on their requirements and services and to promote themselves in English on the web. Hence the need for corpus resources and studies of institutional academic English used as an international language (or lingua franca) on the web. This paper introduces “acWaC-EU” (an acronym for “academic Web-as-Corpus in Europe”), a corpus of web pages in English crawled from the websites of European universities and annotated with contextual metadata. The corpus contains approximately 40 million words from native English universities and a similar number of words from universities based in all other European countries, in which English is used as a lingua franca. Thanks to the metadata, it is possible to re-group texts for comparison based, e.g., on the language family of the native language spoken in the country where the text was produced. The paper describes and evaluates the corpus construction pipeline and the corpus itself, presents a case study on the use of modal and semi-modal verbs in lingua franca vs. native texts, and looks at future developments, in particular as concerns simple heuristics for topic-/genre-oriented subcorpus construction.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
