The Concept, Types and Utility of Web Corpora

Web Corpora as a Source of Information for Etymological Studies

Abstract

The defining condition of a Web corpus will be that it is a huge amount of text data collected from the Internet. Although Websites such as Google Books, National Diet Library Digital Collections and newspaper archives do not satisfy the condition, they nevertheless cannot be clearly distinguished from typical Web corpora, and thus it may not be groundless to regard them as a type of Web corpus. This article, drawing upon two case studies, will demonstrate that we can easily enhance the level of the description of the history of Japanese as well as Chinese terms of the modern era with the help of information obtainable from those Websites.