Using COHA to Explore the Usage of Accounting
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14738/assrj.57.4924Keywords:
Accounting, Matching string, the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA)Abstract
Accounting is a significant discipline in social science. This paper sets out to investigate the matching strings of accounting by examining a 400-million-word Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), enabling us to have better understanding about how accounting has gone through three processes and evolved into a discipline. The results show that 1) the frequency of accounting follows an upward but a little fluctuating trend from 1810s to 2000s; 2) in 1810s-1890s, accounting was in its infancy, the major searching results of COHA reveals a high frequency of the expression “accounting for”, which has little connection with a discipline; 3) in 1900s-1940s, the usage of accounting has become enriched, with a large number of diversified expressions like “the system of accounting, the accounting division, the accounting department, financial accounting” are quite common in COHA; 4) in 1950s-2000s, accounting has gradually been regarded as a discipline: students start to learn accounting lessons or major in accounting.
References
Ball, R. & P. Brown (1968). An Empirical Evaluation of Accounting Income Numbers. Journal of Accounting Research, 6, 159-178.
Beaver, W.H., Kennelly, J. W. & W.M. Voss (1968). Predictive Ability as a Criterion for the Evaluation of Accounting Data. Accounting Review, 43(4), 675-683.
Bell, P. (2010). Accounting as a Discipline for Study and Practice: 1986. Contemporary Accounting Research, 3(2), 338-367.
Carmona, S. (2002). Accounting history research and its diffusion in an international context. Working Paper, 12, 1-22.
Carnegie, G.D. & B.N. Potter (2000). Publishing patterns in specialist accounting history journals in the English language, 1996–1999. Accounting Historians Journal, 27(2), 177-198.
Davis, M. (2012). Expanding horizons in historical linguistics with the 400-million word Corpus of Historical American English. Corpora, 7(2), 121-157.
Feltham, G.A. (1968). The Value of Information. Accounting Review, 43, 684-696.
Jones, M. J. & R. Roberts (2000). International publishing patterns: an investigation of leading U.K. and U.S. journals. The 23rd Annual Congress of the European Accounting Association, Munich.
Miller, P., Hopper, T. & R. Laughlin (1991). The new accounting history: An introduction. Accounting, Organization and Society, 16(5), 395-403.
Needles, B., Powers, M. & S. Crosson. 2012. Principles of Accounting (12th edition). South-Western Cengage Learning.
Storey, R.K. 1964. The Search for Accounting Principles. New York: American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.
Whittington, G. (1986). Financial Accounting Theory: An Overview. British Accounting Review, 18(2), 4-41.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Authors wishing to include figures, tables, or text passages that have already been published elsewhere are required to obtain permission from the copyright owner(s) for both the print and online format and to include evidence that such permission has been granted when submitting their papers. Any material received without such evidence will be assumed to originate from the authors.