Research Guides: Linguistics: Corpus-based Linguistics

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There are specialized reference resources in all branches of linguistics. Most of these resources can be found either electronically or in the 9th floor reference area.

Specialized titles

These resources provide access to linguistic corpora or other materials that may be valuable for corpus-based work.

Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) This link opens in a new window
The Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) is an open consortium of universities, libraries, corporations and government research laboratories. It was formed in 1992 to address the critical data shortage then facing language technology research and development. LDC creates and distributes a wide array of language resources, including materials used by those engaged in language-related education, research and technology development. Spanning data collections, corpora, software, research papers and specifications, these vital tools aid and inspire scientific progress. Please note that NYU does not currently own all available products available from LDC.
To access LDC data, you must be identified as a member of the NYU Community. To get started, go to the account homepage and create an account using your NYU email. Please be sure to enter "New York University" (without the quotes) into the "Organization" box and then select it as an organization. After you make your account, you will be contacted with next steps.
English-Corpora.org This link opens in a new window
The English-Corpora.org online version is comprised of several corpora including: iWeb, the Intelligent Web Corpus; NOW, News on the Web; Coronavirus Corpus; COCA ,Corpus of Contemporary American English; GloWbE, Global Web-based English; Wikipedia Corpus; COHA: Corpus of Historical American English; TV Corpus; Movies Corpus, SOAP Corpus, as well as Corpus del Español and Corpus do Português. The corpora have many different uses, including: finding out how native speakers actually speak and write; finding the frequency of words, phrases, and collocates; looking at language variation and change; e.g. historical, dialects, and genres; gaining insight into culture; for example what is said about different concepts over time and in different countries; designing authentic language teaching materials and resources. To access the corpora as a downloadable set for offline use see the resource "English-Corpora Text-as-Data."
Users must create an account with English-Corpora.org using their NYU emails. Users must also connect using this link at least once every 365 days to retain their account's access.
English-Corpora Text-as-Data This link opens in a new window
For additional help, please contact libraries-tdm@nyu.edu.
ProQuest Historical Newspapers Text-as-Data Collection This link opens in a new window
ProQuest Historical Newspapers Text-as-Data Collection consists of machine-readable XML files containing metadata and full-text content for 26 historical newspapers spanning the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. The collection is available to NYU faculty and students.
An overview of newspaper, time coverage, and access points can be found on the NYU Libraries guide to the collection.

Caselaw Access Project
The Caselaw Access Project (“CAP”) expands public access to U.S. law. Our goal is to make all published U.S. court decisions freely available to the public online, in a consistent format, digitized from the collection of the Harvard Law Library.
CAP includes all official, book-published United States case law — every volume designated as an official report of decisions by a court within the United States.
The scope includes all state courts, federal courts, and territorial courts for American Samoa, Dakota Territory, Guam, Native American Courts, Navajo Nation, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Earliest case is from 1658, and most recent cases are from 2018.
Each volume has been converted into structured, case-level data broken out by majority and dissenting opinion, with human-checked metadata for party names, docket number, citation, and date.