Article published In: International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 23:4 (2018) ► pp.494–508
BasiScript
A corpus of contemporary Dutch texts written by primary school children
Published online: 27 December 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.17086.tel
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.17086.tel
Abstract
This short paper introduces BasiScript, a 9-million-word corpus of contemporary Dutch texts written by primary
school children. The data were collected over three years with 17,216 children contributing texts throughout this period. Each
word token in the corpus is annotated with the correct orthographical form, the associated lemma and the part of speech. The most
frequent polysemous words have been annotated for word meaning, while all words in the lexicon that was derived from the
BasiScript corpus have been annotated for corpus and subcorpora frequency, dispersion, length, family size, family frequency,
orthographic neighborhood size, and orthographic neighborhood frequency. Images of the texts are available to researchers. The
present article describes the corpus and presents a comparison of BasiScript with BasiLex (a Dutch corpus with texts primary
school children are likely to read, completed in 2015) by means of frequency profiling.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.BasiScript
- 2.1Data collection
- 2.2Format
- 2.3Annotation
- 3.BasiScript versus BasiLex: Frequency profiling
- 3.1Method
- 3.2Differences in the frequencies of function words
- 4.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
References
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