A report on corpus

Due to the discrepancy which exists between languages, it is possible that a word in one language might have more than two counterparts in other language. “Field” and “sphere” are a good example for this: in Korean, they have the same meaning. To help students discern the subtle differences between the two words, I employed Corpus of American Temporary English and chose “KWIC” and “Compare” section where I analyzed tens of concordances. This method attributes to tell the difference between the two words especially with respect to three items: syntactic position each word takes within a sentence, words that typically follow each, and the genre in which each is used commonly.

Originally, I surmised that the major meaning for both words would be “an area of activity, interest, etc., especially within a particular business or profession.” My supposition was right only for sphere, considering the result that field was most frequently used as “a piece of ground devoted to sports or contests.” These interpretations are supported by the following date below.

First off, more than half (3401 tokens out of 6259) of the concordances of sphere were found in academic usage. It chiefly appears right after an adjective such as “political, private, economic, public, etc.” - public is the adjective that most frequently preceded it. Besides, it was directly followed by “of” as in  “sphere of art/culture/consumption”, all of which indicate that the word means “an area of a certain thing.” Though not prominent in academic corpora, it was also used in fictions (1140 tokens) and magazines (1112 tokens).

On the other hand, field was most often followed by adjectives like magnetic and research. This result is likely to result from the fact that the combination of words “magnetic field” has became a common terminology in science. However, field was also frequently used after words like “playing, open, goal,” in fictions, newspapers and magazines. And the number of such corpora outnumbers that of academic corpus. Based on the above analysis, it is inferred that field is most used as “a piece of ground devoted to sports or contents,” as was mentioned before.

As a final point, field is a more often used word than sphere - it appears approximately 13 times more than sphere. However, because its primary meaning is chiefly found in sports, sphere is a better word when students are trying to describe an area of a certain thing.

Reference: Davies, Mark. (2008-) The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 450 million words, 1990-present. Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.