The British National Corpus is a valuable resource but has certain problems as it comes straight off the cdrom:

 

•it is in Unix format

•it has entities like é to represent characters like é

•its structure is opaque and file-names mean nothing

 

You will find it much easier to use if you

 

•convert it to Unicode

•filter the files to make a useful structure

 

as explained at http://lexically.net/wordsmith/Handling_BNC/index.html

 

The easiest way to do that is in two stages.

 

Conversion:

 

After choosing the texts,

 

and when you press OK you'll be asked something like this

After the work is done you will see the BNC texts copied to a similar structure (in our case stemming from j:\temp)

 

 

Filter

 

Choose the converted texts in the first window:

 

de-activate conversion,

and choose filtering like this:

 

Eventually you should get folder structures like this: