The use of large, computerized bodies of text for linguistic analysis and description has emerged in recent years as one of the most significant and rapidly-developing fields of activity in the study of language. This book provides a comprehensive introduction and guide to Corpus Linguistics. All aspects of the field are explored, from the various types of electronic corpora that are available to instructions on how to design and compile a corpus. Graeme Kennedy surveys the development of corpora for use in linguistic research, looking back to the pre-electronic age as well as to the massive growth of computer corpora in the electronic age.
Over the past decades, the use of quantitative methods has become almost generalized in all domains of linguistics. However, using these methods requires a thorough understanding of the principles underlying them. Introduction to quantitative methods in linguistics aims at providing students with an up-to-date and accessible guide to both corpus linguistics and experimental linguistics. The objectives are to help students developing critical thinking about the way these methods are used in the literature and helping them to devise their own research projects using quantitative data analysis.
This is the first book of its kind to provide a practical and student-friendly guide to corpus linguistics that explains the nature of electronic data and how it can be collected and analyzed. Designed to equip readers with the technical skills necessary to analyze and interpret language data, both written and (orthographically) transcribed Introduces a number of easy-to-use, yet powerful, free analysis resources consisting of standalone programs and web interfaces for use with Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux Each section includes practical exercises, a list of sources and further reading, and illustrated step-by-step introductions to analysis tools Requires only a basic knowledge of computer concepts in order to develop the specific linguistic analysis skills required for understanding/analyzing corpus data
Corpora are used widely in linguistics, but not always wisely. This book attempts to frame corpus linguistics systematically as a variant of the observational method. The first part introduces the reader to the general methodological discussions surrounding corpus data as well as the practice of doing corpus linguistics, including issues such as the scientific research cycle, research design, extraction of corpus data and statistical evaluation. The second part consists of a number of case studies from the main areas of corpus linguistics (lexical associations, morphology, grammar, text and metaphor), surveying the range of issues studied in corpus linguistics while at the same time showing how they fit into the methodology outlined in the first part.
The first textbook of its kind, Quantitative Corpus Linguistics with R demonstrates how to use the open source programming language R for corpus linguistic analyses. Computational and corpus linguists doing corpus work will find that R provides an enormous range of functions that currently require several programs to achieve – searching and processing corpora, arranging and outputting the results of corpus searches, statistical evaluation, and graphing.
This handbook is a comprehensive practical resource on corpus linguistics. It features a range of basic and advanced approaches, methods and techniques in corpus linguistics, from corpus compilation principles to quantitative data analyses. The Handbook is organized in six Parts. Parts I to III feature chapters that discuss key issues and the know-how related to various topics around corpus design, methods and corpus types. Parts IV-V aim to offer a user-friendly introduction to the quantitative analysis of corpus data: for each statistical technique discussed, chapters provide a practical guide with R and come with supplementary online material. Part VI focuses on how to write a corpus linguistic paper and how to meta-analyze corpus linguistic research. The volume can serve as a course book as well as for individual study. It will be an essential reading for students of corpus linguistics as well as experienced researchers who want to expand their knowledge of the field.
English Corpus Linguistics is a step-by-step guide to creating and analyzing linguistic corpora. It begins with a discussion of the role that corpus linguistics plays in linguistic theory, demonstrating that corpora have proven to be very useful resources for linguists who believe that their theories and descriptions of English should be based on real rather than contrived data. Charles F. Meyer goes on to describe how to plan the creation of a corpus, how to collect and computerize data for inclusion in a corpus, how to annotate the data that are collected, and how to conduct a corpus analysis of a completed corpus. The book concludes with an overview of the challenges that corpus linguists face to make both the creation and analysis of corpora much easier undertakings than they currently are. Clearly organized and accessibly written, this book will appeal to students of linguistics and English language.
Corpus Linguistics for World Englishes offers a detailed account of how to analyse the many fascinating varieties of English around the world using corpus-linguistic methods. Employing case studies for illustration of relevant concepts and methods throughout, this book: introduces the theory and practice of analysing World Englishes illustrates the basics of corpus-linguistic methods and presents the vast World Englishes corpora links World Englishes to Learner Englishes and English as a Lingua Franca offers practical, hands-on exercises and questions for discussion in each chapter provides helpful overviews and course syllabi for students and instructors. Corpus Linguistics for World Englishes is key reading for advanced students of English as a World Language and Corpus Linguistics, as well as anyone keen to understand variation in World Englishes with the help of corpus linguistics.
Corpus Linguistics has quickly established itself as the leading undergraduate course book in the subject. This second edition takes full account of the latest developments in the rapidly changing field, making this the most up-to-date and comprehensive textbook available. It gives a step-by-step introduction to what a corpus is, how corpora are constructed, and what can be done with them. Each chapter ends with a section of study questions that contain practical corpus-based exercises.* Designed for student use, with all technical terms explained in the text and referenced further in a Glossary* Examples are taken from existing corpora; detailed case study chapter included* Contains end-of-chapter summaries, study questions and suggestions for further reading* Updated reviews of new studies, areas that have recently come to prominence and new directions in corpus encoding and annotation standards* Detailed coverage of multilingual corpus construction and use* An in-depth historical review of computer-based corpora from the 1940s to the present day* Helpful appendices include answers to the study questions, up-to-date information on where corpora can be found, and the latest software for corpus research."e;[An] important addition to the fast growing literature in corpus linguistics... should be read by anyone interested in utilization of large-scale corpora in linguistic research."e; Studies in the Linguistic Sciences, on the first edition
Corpus linguistics is the study of language data on a large scale - the computer-aided analysis of very extensive collections of transcribed utterances or written texts. This textbook outlines the basic methods of corpus linguistics, explains how the discipline of corpus linguistics developed and surveys the major approaches to the use of corpus data. It uses a broad range of examples to show how corpus data has led to methodological and theoretical innovation in linguistics in general. Clear and detailed explanations lay out the key issues of method and theory in contemporary corpus linguistics. A structured and coherent narrative links the historical development of the field to current topics in 'mainstream' linguistics. Practical tasks and questions for discussion at the end of each chapter encourage students to test their understanding of what they have read and an extensive glossary provides easy access to definitions of technical terms used in the text.
