The 1930s BROWN Corpus (B-Brown)

Like BLOB-1931, this corpus belongs to the same family of corpora as Brown, LOB, and FLOB. B-Brown extends the chronological span of the Brown corpora, providing an empirical basis for the study of written American English in the first half of the twentieth century. It follows the same sampling criteria originally designed for the Brown corpus of written American English but samples texts from the period 1928-1934.

Project leader: Marianne Hundt
Time of compilation: 2004-2013
Size: ca. 1 million words
Samples: 500 files of approximately 2.000 words each
Language: English
Period: 1928-1934
Project home page:http://www.es.uzh.ch/Subsites/Projects/BBROWN.html

Reference line and Copyright

The B-Brown-1931 Corpus

Manual

Background information on individual files is available in the annotated version of the corpus.

Project Website

Compiler

Availability

Currently available for on-site access at Zürich University only. We hope to make it available on-line with limited access (context) in the near future.

Acknowledgements

Stefanie Dose, Nina Lötsch, Melanie Röthlisberger and Kerry O’Reilly were involved in text acquisition and digitization of the corpus at various stages, Gerold Schneider added syntactic annotation (PoS-tagging and parsing).

Versions

B-Brown exists in two formats:

• untagged plain text
• non-PoS-tagged XML version

A PoS-tagged and parsed version of the corpus is searchable locally at Zürich University.

Associated projects

Brown Corpus
LOB Corpus
Frown Corpus
F-LOB Corpus
BLOB-1931 Corpus
BLOB-1901 Corpus

References

Hundt, Marianne and Geoffrey Leech. 2012. 'Small is Beautiful – on the value of standard reference corpora for observing recent grammatical change.' In Terttu Nevalainen and Elizabeth Traugott. Eds. The Oxford Handbook of the History of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 175-188.