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ICECUP

Brief description

ICECUP is a program that can be used to explore the British English section of theInternational Corpus of English (ICE-GB). Each textual entity (sentence) in this corpus has been fully syntactically analysed and can be presented in tree structure. Take, for example, the sentence: "Does she play tennis?"

ICECUP allows you to carry out simple searches for words and word groups and shows the results as a concordance. Moreover, the program can search for various syntactic annotations (such as word type, part of speech and syntactic function), and for various characteristics of spoken language in the spoken part of the corpus (such as pauses and overlap). Finally, ICECUP includes a powerful search tool to find complex syntactic structures. An extra feature is the ability to define so-called fuzzy tree fragments (FTFs), which can be used to search for parts of tree structures. Here is an example of such a search query:

Search pattern for all instances of direct objects (OD) which are immediately followed by a prepositional phrase (PP) functioning as an adverbial (A).

Manual

Getting started with ICECUP 3.1

The program has a good built-in help feature.

Availability

ICECUP is available on all VU PCs for students and staff members of the Faculty of Humanities.

More information

ICECUP 3.1 Information pages
These web pages provide information about the features of ICECUP, as well as a flash video that shows how to use it.

For more information on the ICE-GB corpus, please go to the Overview of text corpora in the Faculty or Humanities (select Corpus language = English).