Designing, Describing and Compiling a Corpus of English for Architecture

This full paper presents the CADCE (Corpus of Architecture Discourse in Contemporary English), a collection of approximately 500.000 words of written language from a range of different sources designed to represent the language of Architecture in contemporary English in order to study the lexis of this particular field. The CADCE is monolingual and it is not annotated; it includes texts from North-American, British, Irish, Canadian and Australian publications. It is a synchronic corpus since it gathers recent texts published from 2007-2008. It is a specific-purpose corpus limited to a particular subject, namely Architecture, a discipline that comprises many other related subareas: construction, urbanism, landscape architecture, building materials, green architecture, interior design, etc. The design principles that favoured the creation of this corpus are representativeness (size, topic, sources, level of technicality), contemporariness (current, authentic, up-to-date publications) and accessibility (online, free-accessed, computerized texts). Thanks to the design of this research tool the main aspects involved in the lexical profile of Architecture English could be described and analyzed.