The Browse a file page offers instant access to any text in the BNC. You can browse the file by specifying its 3-character name (e.g. G00) in the first box, and optionally set a sentence number as the point at which to start browsing. A list of BNC filenames and their titles can be found in the BNC User Reference Guide.

The following screenshot shows an extract from the written text file G00:

If you accessed the Browse a file page from a BNC query result display, the query string will be highlighted in red. Other instances of the same string in the text will be highlighted in light blue. Use the navigation links "<<" and ">>" to browse through the file. The number of <s>-units displayed per page can be increased up to a maximum of 60 via the drop-down menu. The default number of <s>-units displayed can be set in the User settings. Further information about the text file can be accessed via the File information page by selecting 'File info for ...' in the drop-down menu.

Further display options are available via two buttons:

1. Show POS-tags: Displays words with POS-tags attached.
2. Colour wordclass: Colours words according to groups of POS-tags (e.g. all adjectives). Items having ambiguity tags (i.e. where the automatic tagger could not unambiguously assign a single tag) are shown in orange.

The following screenshot displays a conversation from text file KCU:

In addition to the actual words spoken, paralinguistic phenomena such as voice quality, overlap (indicated with <-|->), significant pauses, unclear passages, etc. are displayed. Please refer to the BNC User Reference Guide for a complete list.

If available, speakers will be shown using the names given in the header of the text files. It is, however, possible to hide the names and display the BNC speaker-IDs instead.

Information about the setting of the currently displayed extract from a spoken text can be accessed via the drop-down menu by choosing 'Show setting':

1. The original BNC text files are annotated using SGML-tags. The conversion to standard HTML for display in your browser may not always be 100% accurate (e.g. special characters, lists contained within lists, etc.).