BNC AND COCA AS CORPUS RESOURCES OF THE VERBAL EMOTICON IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH: REPRESENTATIVENESS, SEARCH TOOLS, AND LIMITS OF INTERPRETATION
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Published:
Aug 10, 2026
Abstract
The article substantiates the methodological value of the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English for the study of the verbal emoticon in contemporary English. The verbal emoticon is defined as a functional-discursive category: a verbal unit or construction that names, frames, intensifies, evaluates, or performs emotion in a specific context. The category includes lexical nominations, predicative patterns, evaluative exclamatives, interjective formulas, metaphorical expressions, and phraseological units when they function as markers of affective stance or interpersonal alignment. The study argues that BNC and COCA should not be used as interchangeable sources. BNC provides documented British evidence and enables comparison between written and spoken material, while COCA offers a large American corpus with genre-sensitive access to frequency, KWIC, collocation, and diachronic distribution. The article develops a corpus-based procedure that combines inventory building, concordance reading, collocational and constructional analysis, genre comparison, and contextual annotation. It also defines the interpretive limits of corpus evidence: frequency measures textual representation rather than psychological occurrence; collocation indicates recurrent co-selection but does not explain meaning without context; and corpus architecture determines the scope of possible conclusions. The final section outlines the relevance of corpus-grounded semantic profiling for large language models, especially for emotion recognition, stance detection, and affect-sensitive language generation.
How to Cite
Bober, N., & Makhachashvili, R. (2026). BNC AND COCA AS CORPUS RESOURCES OF THE VERBAL EMOTICON IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH: REPRESENTATIVENESS, SEARCH TOOLS, AND LIMITS OF INTERPRETATION. Academia Polonica, 76(3), 53-62. https://doi.org/10.23856/7606
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Keywords
affective stance; concordance; collocation; discourse pragmatics; emotional language; semantic profiling; language models.
References
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24. Kilgarriff, A. (2001). Comparing corpora. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 6(1), 97-133. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.6.1.05kil
25. Love, R., Dembry, C., Hardie, A., Brezina, V., & McEnery, T. (2017). The Spoken BNC2014:Designing and building a spoken corpus of everyday conversations. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 22(3), 319-344. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.22.3.02lov
26. Makhachashvili, R. (2022). Suchasni vymiry linhvistyky ta komunikatsii: modeli rozvytku movy u tsyfrovomu seredovyshchi [Contemporary dimensions of linguistics and communication: Models of language development in the digital environment]. Kyiv: Kyiv Borys Grinchenko University [in Ukrainian].
27. McEnery, T., & Hardie, A. (2012). Corpus linguistics: Method, theory and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
28. Mohammad, S. M., & Turney, P. D. (2013). Crowdsourcing a word-emotion association lexicon. Computational Intelligence, 29(3), 436-465. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8640.2012.00460.x
29. Pavlenko, A. (2008). Emotion and emotion-laden words in the bilingual lexicon. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 11(2), 147-164. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728908003283
30. Sinclair, J. (1991). Corpus, concordance, collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
31. Stefanowitsch, A., & Gries, S. Th. (2003). Collostructions: Investigating the interaction of words and constructions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 8(2), 209-243. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.8.2.03ste
32. Tognini-Bonelli, E. (2001). Corpus linguistics at work. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.6
33. Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A. N., Kaiser, L., & Polosukhin, I. (2017). Attention is all you need. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 30.
34. Wierzbicka, A. (1999). Emotions across languages and cultures: Diversity and universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
35. Zhukovska, V. V. (2023). Kvantytatyvni korpuso-bazovani metody v doslidzhenniakh iz konstruktsiinoi hramatyky [Quantitative corpus-based methods in construction grammar research]. Visnyk Zhytomyrskoho derzhavnoho universytetu imeni Ivana Franka. Filolohichni nauky, 1(99), 93-104. https://doi.org/10.35433/philology.1(99).2023.93-104 [in Ukrainian].
2. Atkins, S., Clear, J., & Ostler, N. (1992). Corpus design criteria. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 7(1), 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/7.1.1
3. Bakhtina, A. O. (2023). Polilateralnist emoji u kompiuternomu butti (na materiali suchasnykh yevropeiskykh mov) [The polylaterality of emoji in computer being (based on modern European languages)] (PhD dissertation). Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University, Kyiv. https://elibrary.kubg.edu.ua/id/eprint/45578/ [in Ukrainian].
4. Bednarek, M. (2008). Emotion talk across corpora. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230285712
5. Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S. (2021). On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big? In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (pp. 610-623). https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922
6. Biber, D. (1993). Representativeness in corpus design. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 8(4), 243-257. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/8.4.243
7. Biber, D., Conrad, S., & Reppen, R. (1998). Corpus linguistics: Investigating language structure and use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
8. BNC Consortium. (2007). The British National Corpus, version 3 (BNC XML Edition). Oxford: Oxford Text Archive.
9. Bober, N. M. (2020). Matrychne profiliuvannia semantyky frazovo-diieslivnykh emotyviv u Brytanskomu natsionalnomu korpusi [Matrix profiling of the semantics of phrasal-verb emotives in the British National Corpus] (Candidate of Philological Sciences dissertation). National Pedagogical Dragomanov University, Kyiv. https://npu.edu.ua/images/file/vidil_aspirant/dicer/D_26.053.26/Bober1.pdf [in Ukrainian].
10. Bommasani, R., Hudson, D. A., Adeli, E., Altman, R., Arora, S., von Arx, S., Bernstein, M. S., Bohg, J., Bosselut, A., Brunskill, E., et al. (2021). On the opportunities and risks of foundation models. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.07258
11. Brezina, V. (2018). Statistics in corpus linguistics: A practical guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
12. Brezina, V., Hawtin, A., & McEnery, T. (2021). The Written British National Corpus 2014 – design and comparability. Text & Talk, 41(5-6), 595-615. https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2020-0052
13. British National Corpus Consortium. (2007). Users reference guide for the British National Corpus XML Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Computing Services.
14. Davies, M. (2010). The Corpus of Contemporary American English as the first reliable monitor corpus of English. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 25(4), 447-464. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqq018
15. Davies, M. (2020). The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). English-Corpora.org. https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/
16. Demska-Kulchytska, O. M. (2005). Osnovy natsionalnoho korpusu ukrainskoi movy [Foundations of the national corpus of the Ukrainian language]. Kyiv: Instytut ukrainskoi movy NAN Ukrainy [in Ukrainian].
17. Devlin, J., Chang, M.-W., Lee, K., & Toutanova, K. (2019). BERT: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. In Proceedings of NAACL-HLT 2019 (pp. 4171-4186). https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/N19-1423
18. Ekman, P. (1992). An argument for basic emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 6(3-4), 169-200. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699939208411068
19. Gries, S. Th. (2017). Quantitative corpus linguistics with R: A practical introduction (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.
20. Gries, S. Th., & Stefanowitsch, A. (2004). Extending collostructional analysis: A corpus-based perspective on alternations. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 9(1), 97-129. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.9.1.06gri
21. Holoshchuk, S. L. (2021). Korpusna linhvistyka: suchasnyi stan ta perspektyvy doslidzhen [Corpus linguistics: Current state and prospects of research]. Current Issues of Linguistics and Translation Studies, 22, 33-36. https://doi.org/10.31891/2415-7929-2021-22-7 [in Ukrainian].
22. Hunston, S. (2002). Corpora in applied linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
23. Hunston, S. (2007). Semantic prosody revisited. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 12(2), 249-268. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.12.2.09hun
24. Kilgarriff, A. (2001). Comparing corpora. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 6(1), 97-133. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.6.1.05kil
25. Love, R., Dembry, C., Hardie, A., Brezina, V., & McEnery, T. (2017). The Spoken BNC2014:Designing and building a spoken corpus of everyday conversations. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 22(3), 319-344. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.22.3.02lov
26. Makhachashvili, R. (2022). Suchasni vymiry linhvistyky ta komunikatsii: modeli rozvytku movy u tsyfrovomu seredovyshchi [Contemporary dimensions of linguistics and communication: Models of language development in the digital environment]. Kyiv: Kyiv Borys Grinchenko University [in Ukrainian].
27. McEnery, T., & Hardie, A. (2012). Corpus linguistics: Method, theory and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
28. Mohammad, S. M., & Turney, P. D. (2013). Crowdsourcing a word-emotion association lexicon. Computational Intelligence, 29(3), 436-465. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8640.2012.00460.x
29. Pavlenko, A. (2008). Emotion and emotion-laden words in the bilingual lexicon. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 11(2), 147-164. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728908003283
30. Sinclair, J. (1991). Corpus, concordance, collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
31. Stefanowitsch, A., & Gries, S. Th. (2003). Collostructions: Investigating the interaction of words and constructions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 8(2), 209-243. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.8.2.03ste
32. Tognini-Bonelli, E. (2001). Corpus linguistics at work. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.6
33. Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A. N., Kaiser, L., & Polosukhin, I. (2017). Attention is all you need. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 30.
34. Wierzbicka, A. (1999). Emotions across languages and cultures: Diversity and universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
35. Zhukovska, V. V. (2023). Kvantytatyvni korpuso-bazovani metody v doslidzhenniakh iz konstruktsiinoi hramatyky [Quantitative corpus-based methods in construction grammar research]. Visnyk Zhytomyrskoho derzhavnoho universytetu imeni Ivana Franka. Filolohichni nauky, 1(99), 93-104. https://doi.org/10.35433/philology.1(99).2023.93-104 [in Ukrainian].
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