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"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. It was created at Brigham Young University in 2008, and it is now used by tens of thousands of users every month (linguists, teachers, translators, and other researchers). ... The corpus contains more than 425 million words of text and is equally divided among spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic texts."

Check this article out to learn more about how our own language and our Top 20 keywords in the Oxford Corpus has changed since the beginning of the pandemic. While some words are not uncommon, two new ones come to mind. These are "social distance/social distancing" and "self-isolate/self-isolation." We can see the impact of the coronavirus by seeing which words are now used more frequently.

Graphically compare the popularity of phrases over time.

This would be great for someone's field research--thanks, Ryan!

Google's own book corpus tool

Including corpora of historical and contemporary American English, British English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

In the 1960s, Michael Gazzaniga with Roger Sperry & Joseph Bogen pioneered split brain research. This video shows how one patient's language centers for comprehension and speech are now distinct due to the cutting of his corpus callosum.

Wow! I think the students will find this fascinating.

Talks about how rhythmic characteristics of language and accents are reflected in the rhythms of songs.

In a 2011 published study (https://mp.ucpress.edu/content/29/1/51.full.pdf+html), Nicholas Temperley and David Temperley, 2 musicologists, did a musical corpus analysis showing that the Scotch snap, a sixteenth-note on the beat followed by a dotted eighth-note, is common in both Scottish and English songs, but virtually nonexistent in German and Italian songs, and explored possible linguistic correlates for this phenomenon. British English shows a much higher proportion of very short stressed syllables (less than 100 ms) than the other two languages. Four vowels account for a large proportion of very short stressed syllables in British English, and also constitute a large proportion of SS tokens in our English musical corpus. A Scotch snap, as Adam Neely notes in the above video, is the musical, rhythmical counterpart to a trochee in poetry. Say the phrase "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" to hear a series of Scotch snaps.

"[New research] is suggesting that atypical brain function is a fundamental aspect of speech production tasks for adults who stutter. ... "Now because many speech areas are interconnected across the two hemispheres through the corpus callosum, it might suggest that hemispheric dominance for speech and language has not been established to the same degree as it has been for normally fluent adults." ... Loucks then used functional magnetic resonance imaging of brain activity to study participants who stutter and found that even brief, simple speech tasks - such as producing a single word to name a picture - is associated with altered functional activity."

A group of anthropologists from England used a computer program to analyze the emotional content of books from every year of the 20th century - close to a billion words in millions of books. Researchers found that the Twenties marked the apex of joy-related words; the overall usage of commonly known emotion words, however, has been in decline over the 20th century. The one exception: "fear", which started to increase just before the 1980s.

Linguists can generally be divided into two groups: prescriptivists, or those who hold that language is governed by fixed rules of grammar, and descriptivists, or those who believe that patterns of actual usage reflect the way the language is used. In extremely broad strokes, if prescriptivists are anal retentive, then descriptivists are free-to-be-you-and-me.

includes links to other literary corpora

more detail from Harvard about how to use N-gram

"Now in the 21st century, with sophisticated text-crunching tools at our disposal, it is possible to put Bridgman's theory to the test. Has a vernacular style become the standard for the typical fiction writer? Or is literary language still a distinct and peculiar beast?"

"Even when daydreaming, there is a tremendous amount of communication happening between different areas in the brain... The fact that these areas are synchronized has led many scientists to presume that they are all part of an interconnected network called a resting-state network. ... that these resting-state networks look essentially normal in people missing the corpus callosum link... [it] highlights the brain's remarkable plasticity... the findings are significant when considering the link between brain connections and autism or schizophrenia."

A team of researchers at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital use computers to analyze the language of suicide notes, in the hope that they can better identify those at risk. By comparing patient interview responses to suicide notes, they can identify how similar or divergent their language is from the language of suicide.Here are three patterns researchers have identified in their corpus of authentic suicide notes: 1. Loss of hope. When hope is gone, when hopelessness emerges - and that's in most of the notes 2. Practical instruction, e.g.. "Remember to change the tires. Remember to change the oil. I drew a check, but I didn't put the money in. Please go ahead and make the deposit." 3. The presence of the following emotions: depression, a little bit of anger, abandonment, and the sense of "I just can't go on any longer. I can't deal with this any longer."

Censorship has been a long-standing issue in China, but its citizens continue to fight for self-expression through clever linguistic circumvention of Internet restrictions. Much of Chinese Internet lingo involves codewords, and the corpus of codewords is constantly changing to accommodate new topics and avoid smarter, stricter censors. It has reached the point where a simple understanding of Chinese vocabulary, syntax, and grammar is no longer enough to fully understand Chinese Internet discourse. On today's Chinese Internet, fully comprehending the language requires a thorough knowledge of current events, a deep respect for historical implications, an agile mastery of cultural conventions, and more often than not, a healthy appreciation of topical humor.

Sex-based differences in the form of English compliments and in the frequencies of various compliment response types are discussed. Based on a corpus of I,062 compliment events, several differences in the form of compliments used by women and men are noted. Further, it is found that compliments from men are generally accepted, especially by female recipients, whereas compliments from women are met with a response type other than acceptance.

TechRadar spoke to Dr Matthew Voice, an Assistant Professor in Applied Linguistics at the UK's University of Warwick, to find out the science behind the struggle to deduce Wordle Puzzle #256. "[In your live blog] you've already talked about _ATCH as a kind of trap. This is an example of an n-gram, i.e. a group of letters of a length (n) that commonly cluster together. So this is an n-gram with a length of four letters: a quadrigram," Professor Voice tells us. "Using [this] Project Gutenberg data, it's interesting to note that _ATCH isn't listed as one of the most common quadrigrams in English overall, but the [same] data considers words of all lengths, rather than just the five letters Wordle is limited to. I don't know of any corpus exclusively composed of common 5 letter words, but it might be the case that _ATCH happens to be particularly productive for that length." "The other thing to mention," Professor Voice adds, "would be that the quadrigram _ATCH is made up of smaller n-grams, like the bigram AT, which is extremely common in English. So we're seeing a lot of common building blocks in one word, which means that sorting individual letters might not be narrowing down people's guesses as much as it would with other words."