Mark E. Davies (born 1963) is an American linguist. He specializes in corpus linguistics and language variation and change. He is the creator of most of the text corpora from English-Corpora.org (including the Corpus of Contemporary American English/ COCA) as well as the Corpus del español and the Corpus do português. He has also created large datasets of word frequency, collocates, and n-grams data, which have been used by many large companies in the fields of technology and also language learning.
Davies earned a bachelor's degree with a double major in linguistics and Spanish from Brigham Young University (BYU) in 1986, followed by an MA in Spanish linguistics from BYU in 1989. He earned his Ph.D. in Iberoromance philology and linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1992. He has received several grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation, to create and use corpora of English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
From 1992 to 2003, Davies was a professor of Spanish at Illinois State University. He was then a professor of linguistics at Brigham Young University from 2003 until his retirement in 2020. At BYU he received numerous awards for research, including the "Karl G. Maeser Research and Creative Arts Award" in 2015 (one of just two given at the university). At BYU, he taught courses in corpus linguistics, historical linguistics, and English grammar.
Contents
Books
Davies, Mark and Kathy Hayward Davies. 2017. A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish: Core Vocabulary for Learners. Second edition: revised and expanded. Routledge.
Davies, Mark and Dee Gardner. 2010. A Frequency Dictionary of American English: Word Sketches, Collocates, and Thematic Lists. Routledge.
Gries, Stefan, Stefanie Wulff, and Mark Davies. 2009. Corpus linguistic applications: current studies, new directions. Rodopi.
Davies, Mark and Ana Maria Raposo Preto-Bay. 2007. A Frequency Dictionary of Portuguese: Core Vocabulary for Learners. Routledge.
Davies, Mark. 2005. A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish: Core Vocabulary for Learners. First edition. Routledge.
Davies, Mark. 2004. El uso del Corpus del Español y otros corpus para investigar la variación actual y los cambios históricos. Tokyo: University of Sophia.
Other selected publications (since 2005)
Davies, Mark. 2021. "The Coronavirus Corpus: Design, construction, and use". International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. 26(4): 583–98.
Davies, Mark and Giovanni Parodi. 2021. "Constitución de corpus crecientes del español". In Giovanni Parodi, Pascual Cantos, Chad Howe. The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Corpus Linguistics.
Kim, Jong-Bok and Mark Davies. 2020. "English what with absolute constructions: a Construction Grammar perspective." English Language and Linguistics 24(4): 637–666.
Davies, Mark. 2020. "The TV and Movies corpora: design, construction, and use." International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. 26(1): 10–37.
Davies, Mark and Jong-Bok Kim. 2019. "The advantages and challenges of ‘big data’: Insights from the 14 billion word iWeb corpus". Linguistic Research 36(1), 1-34.
Davies, Mark. 2019. "The best of both worlds: Multi-billion word ‘dynamic’ corpora". In Piotr Banski, et al. Proceedings of the Workshop on Challenges in the Management of Large Corpora (CMLC-7) 2019. Mannheim: Leibniz-Institut fur Deutsche Sprache.
Davies, Mark and Jong-Bok Kim. 2019. "Historical shifts with the into-causative construction in American English." Linguistics 57: 29–58.
Gardner, Dee and Mark Davies. 2018. "Sorting them all out: Exploring the separable phrasal verbs of English." System 76: 197–209.
Davies, Mark. 2018. "Using (and useful) corpora for the study of the history of English". In Teaching the History of the English Language, eds. Chris Palmer and Colette Moore. MLA Options for Teaching Series.
Davies, Mark. 2018. "Corpus-based studies of lexical and semantic variation: The importance of both corpus size and corpus design." In From data to evidence in English language research (Digital Linguistics), eds. Suhr, Carla, Terttu Nevalainen and Irma Taavitsainen. Leiden: Brill. 34–55.