Resources

The Bank of English is now hosted on CQPWeb, on a Birmingham server. This allows Birmingham staff and students access to the corpus and other corpora through the same interface. It requires a bham.ac.uk email address for you to be able to register.

Please note that the previous version of the Bank of English which had been hosted on the Titania server is now closed and is no longer available. The Bank of English at Birmingham is now only available on CQPweb.

Access to some of the video data and ELAN annotation files that form the British Sign Language (BSL) Corpus based at University College London is available here. Creating the British Sign Language Corpus was a joint venture involving five UK universities during 2008-2011, led by Dr Adam Schembri who is now based here at the University of Birmingham and who continues to work on corpus-based approaches to the study of BSL linguistics.

CLiC is a web application for the corpus linguistic analysis of Dickens’s novels and other literary texts. The web app is being developed as part of the CLiC Dickens project, a collaboration between the University of Birmingham and the University of Nottingham, funded by the AHRC. Please see the CLiC Dickens project site.

This is the full online version of a publication from the Cobuild Project.

• View publication

The Conceptualising Transitivity Networks through Pattern-Based Constructions project has brought together insights from three approaches to the lexis and grammar of English. From Corpus Linguistics and lexicography comes the concept of Pattern Grammar; from Cognitive Linguistics comes Construction Grammar; and from Systemic-Functional Linguistics comes the concept of the network as a model of choices in semantics and in lexicogrammar.

The English Constructicon project aims to build a comprehensive inventory of grammatical constructions of the English language, following the principles of Construction Grammar theory.

EuroCoAT (European Corpus of Academic Talk) provides transcripts of academic conversations between undergraduate Erasmus students (L1 Spanish) and their lecturers at different host universities. The EuroCoAT project is a collaboration between the Universities of Extremadura, Birmingham, Limerick, Dalarna and VU Amsterdam.

A web-based client program for searching and retrieving lexical, grammatical and textual data from the British National Corpus (BNC). It requires a bham.ac.uk email address for you to be able to register. This gives access to the British National Corpus.

The Centre has a licence for the CLAWS tagger (UCREL, Lancaster). Staff or students who are interested in POS-tagging large quantities of data for research should contact Paul Thompson.

Institutional access to the Sketch Engine interface is available on any computer on the University network (but not outside the network). Approximately 160 corpora are included.

The Centre also has a licence for the WMatrix suite of semantic and POS annotation and analysis tools developed by Paul Rayson (UCREL, Lancaster). Staff or students who are interested in using WMatrix for research should contact Paul Thompson.

Institutional access to the Wordbanks Online service is available on any computer on the University network (but not outside the network). Wordbanks Online is the HarperCollins interface for the 550 million word version of the Bank of English.

We organise the Corpus Linguistics Summer School annually. The webpages for the most recent summer schools are available below:

• Corpus Linguistics Summer School 2025
• Corpus Linguistics Summer School 2024
• Corpus Linguistics Summer School 2023

We also organise the Sinclair Lecture annually. The webpages for recent lectures are available below:

• Sinclair Lecture 2025
• Sinclair Lecture 2024
• Sinclair Lecture 2023

• 2017, University of Birmingham
• 2013, Lancaster University [PDF, 7.5 MB]
• 2011, University of Birmingham
• 2009, University of Liverpool
• 2007, University of Birmingham
• 2005, University of Birmingham
• 2003, Lancaster University
• 2001, Lancaster University