Aim and Objectives: • To introduce the readers and leading them to the power of Corpus Linguistics • To stimulate the readers’ curiosity of the use of corpus as a methodology of research of any kind

1. {
Corpus and OUHK
Charles Ko Ka Shing

2.  Introducing the audience and leading them to
the power of Corpus Linguistics
Aim

3.  What is Corpus?
 Corpus (Latin plural corpora, English plural
corpuses or corpora) is Latin for body. It may refer
to: Habeas corpus, a legal mechanism to end
detention of a suspect Corpus delicti, a legal term
meaning "body of the crime...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus :
 [Corpus in Linguistics, Applied Linguistics and
Corpus Linguistics]
 “Text corpus, in linguistics, a large and structured
set of texts
 Speech corpus, in linguistics, a large set of speech
audio files”
Foreword

4.  Find Corpora on Yahoo!
http://tw.search.yahoo.com/search?fr=fp-tab-web-
t&ei=UTF-8&p=corpus
 Example:
 The Corpus of Contemporary American English
(COCA) is the largest freely-available corpus of
English, and the only large and balanced corpus of
American English. The corpus was created by Mark
Davies of Brigham Young University, and it is used by
tens of thousands of users every month
(linguists, teachers, translators, and other researchers).
COCA is also related to other large corpora that we
have created.
 Source: http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/

5.  […] corpus linguistics is a whole system of
methods and principles of how to apply
 corpora in language studies and
teaching/learning, it certainly has a theoretical
status. Yet theoretical status is not theory in
itself…
 (McEnery et al. 2006: 7f.)
What is Corpus Linguistics?

6.  In this presentation, I will use the most
updated corpus, Corpus of Global Web-based
ENGLISH (GloWbE)
 The Corpus of Global Web-based English
(GloWbE) http://corpus2.byu.edu/glowbe/
that is developed on the corpus2 website
involves 20 varieties of English.
To taste the GloWbE

7.  Familiaritiy towards the names of the following selected
universities:

 1. The Open University of Hong Kong (OUHK)
 2. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU)
 3. City University of Hong Kong (CityU)
 4. Hong Kong Shue Yan University (HKSYU)
 5. Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts (HKAPA)
 6. The Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd)
 7. The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)
 8. The University of Hong Kong (HKU)
 9. Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU)
 10. The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
(HKUST)
 N.B. stress on OUHK
10 selected Hong Kong
“universities”

8.  I would type the abbreviation of the
universities’ names one by one in searching, to
find out which university’s name is mentioned
the most amongst varieties of English (or
Englishes) around the world.
Methods

9.  Analysis and Evaluation
 It is found that, the world “status” (occurrences
in the GloWbE corpus) of the University of
Hong Kong is the highest; while the one of the
Hong Kong Shue Yan University is the lowest.

10. 1. HKU 2. CUHK 3. HKUST 4. PolyU 5. CityU 6. OUHK 7. HKIEd 8. HKBU 9. HKAPA 10. SYU
1124 640 590 341 164 161 78 65 28 14
In addition, the following table shows all the ten selected Hong Kong
institutions’ word frequency*, the order is as follows:
Above Column represents the words, or word types (and 1=highest frequency;
10=lowest frequency.)
Below Column represents the number of occurrences in GloWbE corpus

11.  It is surprising that in the world of the GloWbE
corpus, the OUHK has a higher ranking than
the HKBU and the HKIEd, although it is
generally agreed that the academic status of
OUHK is lower than the two tertiary
institutions (e.g., in http://www.4icu.org/hk/,
see figure below, sort by 2013 university web
ranking according to 4icu.org: in terms of
general facilities and academic support, the
OUHK does not provide more enough than the
HKBU and the HKIEd.)

12.  However, it may also be interpreted that the OUHK’s
promotion of the open learning, especially during the
2012-13 has been done better than the ones of the two
universities (i.e. HKBU and HKIEd), so more people
can receive its education by the OUHK through online
and the people know its name and mention more of its
name, hence the occurrence of its name in the corpus is
higher than the HKBU and HKIEd (however I did not
have a peek into each word types’ KWIC, Key Word in
Context precisely so the results may not be completely
accurate that in actual case there could be other things
not referring to the selected universities are encoded, or
there may be other names encoded to represent the
HKBU and the HKIEd.)
The GloWbE corpus is released in April, 2013, and it is a 2012-2013 corpus. (http://corpus.byu.edu/)
N.B. in the whole process of data collecting, I did not use any wildcards, and any use of tag set is not involved.

13.  there is definitely the room for potential
scholars to research on the most mentioned
name of universities in Hong Kong in each
variety of Englishes, creating an extra
dimension into the research;
In the future,

14.  the researchers can conduct research on the
most mentioned name of world universities in
English, further increasing one more probable
dimension.
or even

15.  Conclusions?

16.  Try!!! the latest Corpus of Global Web-based
English (GloWbE)
http://corpus2.byu.edu/glowbe/

17.  McEnery, T., Xiao, R. & Tono, Y. (2006). Corpus-
based language studies: an advanced resource book.
London/New York: Routledge.
Reference

18.  Thanks.