> "3a: the whole body or total amount of writings of a particular
> particular kind or on a particular subject (as the total
> production of a writer or the whole literature of a subject)
...
> Note that there is no reference to criteria for selection,
Well, there is: `writings OF A PARTICULAR KIND' Like, London
teenager conversations, or samples of 1960s American written English,
or the works of Karl May. All corpora have some criterion that defines
their content; and this is usually more than `a collection of texts in
English from Beowulf to Geoffrey Archer'.
> or on uniformity of storage and retrieval.
Yes, I was making that up as a secondary criterion which you can observe
with many (but not all) corpora.
Oliver
-- //\\ computer officer | corpus research | department of english | school of - //\\ humanities | university of birmingham | edgbaston | birmingham b15 2tt - \\// united kingdom | phone +44-(0)121-414-6206 | fax +44-(0)121-414-5668/\ - \\// mobile 07050 104504 | http://www-clg.bham.ac.uk | o.mason@bham.ac.uk\/ -