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An American national corpus: a proposal

This paper proposes the development of an American National Corpus comparable to the British National Corpus. Corpus-analytic work has demonstrated that the use of the British National Corpus is inappropriate to study of American English, due to the numerous differences in the use of the language. We also propose that the corpus include a component of texts in other major North American languages, notably Spanish and French, and ideally a parallel component containing texts in these languages aligned to the English. The development of an ANC will demand a significant commitment from the funding agencies and the research community; such an effort would, however, significantly contribute to language and linguistic research as well as the U.S. National Digital Libraries Initiative and other large-scale projects.