ICE Bahamas

Bahamian Press Reports (2002-2007)

Corpus Overview

The ICE Bahamas corpus contains press reports from Bahamian newspapers, providing access to written Standard Bahamian English from the mid-2000s.

This corpus is part of the International Corpus of English (ICE) project, representing the Press Reports (W2C) category from the Bahamas component. It has been processed using spaCy’s transformer model (en_core_web_trf) for high-quality linguistic annotation.

Key Statistics

Metric	Value
Total Words	~43,000
Documents	73 press reports
Time Period	2002-2007
Language	Standard Bahamian English
Source	ICE-Bahamas project (LMU Munich)

Geographic Distribution

Place	Documents	Percentage
Nassau	43	59%
Freeport	30	41%

Temporal Distribution

Year	Documents
2002	7
2003	14
2004	10
2005	10
2006	4
2007	27

Available Attributes

Token Attributes

Attribute	Description	Example
`word`	Exact word form	[word="Bahamas"]
`lemma`	Base form (lemma)	[lemma="visit"]
`tag`	POS tag (Penn Treebank)	[tag="NN.*"]
`head_n`	Head position (1-based, 0 for root)	Dependency parsing
`head`	Head lemma	Dependency parsing
`deprel`	Dependency relation	[deprel="nsubj"]
`ent_type`	Named entity type (ORG, PERSON, GPE, etc.)	[ent_type="GPE"]
`ent_iob`	NER IOB tag (B=begin, I=inside, O=outside)	[ent_iob="B"]
`morph`	Morphological features (UD FEATS format)	[morph=".Tense=Past."]

Document Attributes

Attribute	Description	Example Values
`doc.id`	Document ID	1-73
`doc.filename`	Original filename	Pr_01.xml, Pr_02.xml, etc.
`doc.date`	Publication date	YYYYMMDD format
`doc.year`	Publication year	2002-2007
`doc.place`	Publication location	Nassau, Freeport
`doc.gender`	Author gender	f, m, ?, TODO
`doc.age`	Author age	Mostly unknown
`doc.ethnicity`	Author ethnic group	Mostly unknown

CQL Query Examples

Basic Word Search

Find all occurrences of “Bahamas”:

[word="Bahamas"]

Find all forms of “visit”:

[lemma="visit"]

Named Entity Recognition

Find all location names (countries, cities):

[ent_type="GPE"]

Find all organization names:

[ent_type="ORG"]

Find all person names:

[ent_type="PERSON"]

Part-of-Speech Queries

Find all proper nouns:

[tag="NNP.*"]

Find all past tense verbs:

[morph=".Tense=Past."]

Dependency Relations

Find subjects of verbs:

[deprel="nsubj"]

Find direct objects:

[deprel="dobj"]

Combined Queries

Find “hotel” followed by a location within 3 words:

[lemma="hotel"] []{0,3} [ent_type="GPE"]

Find adjectives modifying “tourism”:

[tag="JJ.*"] [lemma="tourism"]

Filter by Location

Search within Nassau articles only:

Use the text type filter to select doc.place = Nassau
Run your query

Quick Reference

Goal	CQL Query
Exact word	[word="Nassau"]
All forms (lemma)	[lemma="tourism"]
Location names	[ent_type="GPE"]
Organization names	[ent_type="ORG"]
Person names	[ent_type="PERSON"]
Past tense verbs	[morph=".Tense=Past."]
Proper nouns	[tag="NNP.*"]
Adjacent words	[lemma="prime"] [lemma="minister"]

References

This corpus is part of the International Corpus of English (ICE) project. ICE-Bahamas is led by Prof. Dr. Stephanie Hackert at LMU Munich. See ice-corpora.uzh.ch for project details.

Key publications:

Corpus description: Hackert (2010)
Bahamian Standard English: Bruckmaier and Hackert (2011)
Urban Bahamian Creole: Hackert (2004)
Gullah connections: Hackert and Huber (2007)
Newspaper usage: Oenbring (2010)

Bruckmaier, Elisabeth, and Stephanie Hackert. 2011. “Bahamian Standard English: A First Approach.” English World-Wide 32: 174–205.

Hackert, Stephanie. 2004. Urban Bahamian Creole: System and Variation. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

———. 2010. “ICE Bahamas: Why and How?” ICAME Journal 34: 41–53. https://www.ice-corpora.uzh.ch/en/joinice/Teams/iceba.html.

Hackert, Stephanie, and Magnus Huber. 2007. “Gullah in the Diaspora: Historical and Linguistic Evidence from the Bahamas.” Diachronica 24: 279–325.

Oenbring, Raymond A. 2010. “Corpus Linguistic Studies of Standard Bahamian English: A Comparative Study of Newspaper Usage.” The International Journal of Bahamian Studies 16: 51–62.