The influence of the benchmark corpus on keyword analysis

Abstract

Abstract The growing popularity of keyword analysis as an applied linguistics methodology has not been matched by an increase in the rigour with which the method is applied. While several studies have investigated the impact of choices made at certain stages of the keyword analysis process, the impact of the choice of benchmark corpus has largely been overlooked. In this paper, we compare a target corpus with several benchmark corpora and show that the keywords generated are different. We also show that certain characteristics of the keyword list and of the keywords themselves vary in relatively predictable ways depending on the benchmark corpus. These variations have implications for the choice of benchmark corpus and how the results of a keyword analysis should be interpreted. Analyzing the keywords from a comparison with a large general corpus or the keyword lists from multiple comparisons may be most appropriate for register studies.