Equal Footing

Vocabulary, at long last, saw its importance placed on an equal footing with both grammar and phonology. The inception of COBUILD* in 1980 testified to this newfound status.


* i.e. Collins Birmingham University International Language Database – a project set up in 1980 that saw the creation of the world’s first electronically stored corpus of modern English (built up from authentic sources: books, magazines, newspapers, transcribed natural speech, etc.) and designed as a reference for language learners, teachers and linguists. The content is descriptive, not prescriptive and is a record of how the language is actually used, in all its richness. Both the research findings and the dictionaries that have emerged from the project have shed a great deal of light on such things as the relative frequency of different uses of language item; and not only have they caused a reappraisal of how vocabulary is tackled in teaching materials, but they have proved to be an invaluable resource for both teachers and language learners. The current corpus, known as Bank of English, runs to tens of millions of words.