Mark Davies (linguist)

Mark E. Davies (born 1963) is an American linguist. He specializes in the creation of linguistic corpora that can be used to better study and understand word meaning. He is the main creator of COCA, the Corpus of Contemporary American English. He received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to build a comparable Spanish language corpus,^[1] the Corpus del Español, and another one to create a corpus of Portuguese texts covering material from the 12th century to the present day.^[2] Another corpus he compiled is a diachronic corpus of English, containing texts from the years 1810 through 2009, called COHA, the Corpus of Historical American English; this project was also funded by the NEH.^[3] Davies is also the creator of the General Conference corpus, which allows a study of how the use of words from the LDS General Conference has changed over time.^[4][5]

Davies earned a bachelor's degree with a double major in linguistics and Spanish from BYU in 1986. He earned an MA in Spanish linguistics also from BYU in 1989. He earned his Ph.D. in Iberoromance philology and linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1992.^[6]

From 1993-2003 Davies was a professor at Illinois State University. He is currently a professor of linguistics at Brigham Young University (BYU) where he has been on the faculty since 2003. In 2008 he held the Barker Lectureship at BYU.

Publications

• 2014. Davies, M. “Making Google Books n-grams useful for a wide range of research on language change.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 19(3): 401-16.
• 2014. Davies, M. “Powerful (yet simple) comparisons of a wide range of phenomena in British and American English.” ICAME Journal 38:35-56.
• 2014. Davies, M. “Examining syntactic variation in English: the importance of corpus design and corpus size.” English Language and Linguistics 19(3): 1-35.
• 2010. Davies, M. and Dee Gardner. A Frequency Dictionary of American English: Word Sketches, Collocates, and Thematic Lists. published by Routledge.
• 2009. Davies, M., S. Th. Gries and S. Wulff (Eds.) Corpus linguistic applications: current studies, new directions. Rodopi.
• 2008. Davies, M. The corpus of contemporary American English: 450 million words, 1990-present.
• 2007. Co-authored with Ana Maria Raposo Preto-Bay. A Frequency Dictionary of Portuguese: Core Vocabulary for Learners. Routledge.
• 2005. Davies, M. A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish: Core Vocabulary for Learners. Routledge.
• 2004. Davies, M. El uso del Corpus del Español y otros corpus para investigar la variación actual y los cambios históricos. University Sophia in Tokyo.

External links

• Davies Vita
• Deseret News, March 13, 2011
• University of Alabama announcement of speech by Davies
• BYU bio page of Davies
• Spanish Language gateway article describing Davies' contributions
• Fox News June 15, 2006 article discussing Davies and his corpora

References

1. Hollingshead, Todd (June 7, 2006). "Wordman of BYU spells out how to speak English". Salt Lake City Tribune. Retrieved March 29, 2015.
2. "NEH Grant Details". Retrieved July 10, 2015.
3. "List 21.3572: Corpus of Historical American English". September 7, 2010. Retrieved July 10, 2015.
4. Kent Larsen, Times and Seasons, March 30, 2011
5. Scott Taylor, "All 24 Million Words of General Conference", Deseret news, April 1, 2011
6. "The diachronic evolution of causative constructions in Spanish and Portuguese". ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Retrieved July 12, 2015.