Newsgroup: it.cultura.linguistica.inglese
Titolo: COCA is good for you! ;)

Essendo iscritto al sito, ricevo in mailbox le ultime novità dal Corpus Of 
Contemporary American English (COCA) di Mark Davies. Vi ripropongo questo 
messaggio che mi pare interessante, sperando di far cosa gradita.
 
===
 
We've added a new feature at 
www.wordandphrase.info
 -- the alternative 
interface for COCA. You can now input an entire text -- maybe a newspaper 
article that you've copied from a website, or something you've written --  
and it will then give you detailed information about the words and phrases 
in the text. There's now no need to copy and paste individual words and 
phrases into the regular COCA interface -- just work seamlessly from your 
original text.
 
 
 
First, it will highlight all of the medium and lower-frequency words in your 
text (based on frequency data from COCA), and create lists of these words 
that you can use offline. This frequency data can help language learners 
focus on new words, and it can allow you to see "what the text is about" 
(i.e. text-specific words). You can also have it show you the "academic" 
words in your text (again, based on COCA data).
 
 
 
Second, you can click on any word in your text to get detailed information 
about the word (all on one screen) -- its overall frequency in COCA, its 
frequency in each genre (spoken, fiction, magazine, newspaper, and 
academic), the 20-30 most frequent collocates (nearby words), up to 200 
sample concordance lines, synonyms, and related words from WordNet. There's 
no need to go consult other dictionaries or thesauruses or 
online-resources -- it's all right there, with just one click for each and 
every word in your text.
 
 
 
Finally, you can also see detailed information about phrases in your text. 
Just click on a phrase in the text, and it will show you related phrases 
from COCA. For example, if you're writing a paper and have used the phrase 
potent argument, you could click on that phrase and then have it suggest 
related phrases based on COCA data -- in this case, where there is a synonym 
of potent followed by argument. For example, it would list strong / 
persuasive / convincing argument (all of which are more common in COCA). It 
will show you the frequency of each phrase in COCA and you can click on any 
of these to see them in context in the corpus. In this way, it serves as a 
sort of "grammatical thesaurus" to find just the right phrase in English.
 
 
 
All of this is now available at 
http://www.wordandphrase.info/
, along with 
the features that were there before, including the ability to browse through 
and search a huge frequency dictionary of English and see detailed 
information about any word. If you are interested in English words and 
phrases, their meaning, their frequency, and their distribution in different 
genres, we believe that this will be an exciting new resource. And as with 
all of our corpora, it is available for free.
 
 
 
Best,
 
 
 
Mark Davies
 
Brigham Young University
 
===
 
 

 We've added a new feature at 
www.wordandphrase.info
 
 
Thanks.
 
-- 
Joey from New York
Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator,
but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.
   -- WH Auden