LELA 30922 English Corpus Linguistics

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LELA 30922English Corpus Linguistics

• Harold Somers
• Professor of Language Engineering
• Office Lamb 1.15

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Syllabus
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Assessment

• A practical project in which students will use
  the BNC (or other approved corpus material) to
  investigate some question of English language
  usage.
• Suggestion base your project (more or less
  closely) on some existing study.
• Project write-up will include relevant background
  material and results and discussion of a
  corpus-based analysis.
• In other words summarize (and criticize) the
  chosen study, then do your own version, and
  compare the results

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Reading matter

• Main recommendations
• Kennedy, G.D. (1998) An introduction to corpus
  linguistics. London Longman.
• McEnery, T. A. Wilson (2001, 2nd ed) Corpus
  linguistics. Edinburgh Edinburgh University
  Press.
• Meyer, C. (2002) English corpus Linguistics An
  introduction. Cambridge Cambridge University
  Press.
• Lots of other books, focussing on particular
  aspects
• Do not ignore journals (Int J Corp Ling) and
  specialist conferences, especially when
  considering practical assignment.
• http//tinyurl.com/32abhb for list of resources
  available at UoM

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What is a corpus?

• Corpus (pl. corpora) body
• Collection of written text or transcribed speech
• Usually but not necessarily purposefully
  collected
• Usually but not necessarily structured
• Usually but not necessarily annotated
• (Usually stored on and accessible via computer)
• Corpus text archive

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Computers and corpus linguistics

• Historically, manual analysis of large bodies of
  text (esp. in literary and biblical studies)
• Error-prone, time-consuming, not verifiable
• Computers have introduced
• Reliability, accuracy and replicability
• increased speed and capacity means you can do
  more on a grander scale
• new tools mean you can do things you might not
  have thought of doing

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What is corpus linguistics?

• Not a branch of linguistics, like socio,
  psycho,
• Not a theory of linguistics
• A set of tools and methods (and a philosophy) to
  support linguistic investigation across all
  branches of the subject

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Evidence in linguistics

• Real attested usage as linguistic evidence
• Contrasts with introspective approach previously
  typical
• Relates to the competenceperformance
  (langueparole) distinction
• Corpus linguists often more interested in trends
  than rules (probabilities rather than
  certainties)
• Famous stories of corpus evidence contradicting
  widely-held assumptions about language use.

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Activities in corpus linguistics

• Design and compilation of corpora
• Development of tools for corpus analysis
• Descriptive linguists using corpora to analyze
  lexical and grammatical behaviour of language, eg
  for lexicography
• Exploiting corpora in applied linguistics
  language teaching, translation.

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History of Corpus Linguisticswww.essex.ac.uk/ling
uistics/clmt/w3c/corpus_ling/content/history.html

• Textual study has always included an element of
  counting and cataloguing, despite
  impracticalities notably concordances of
  Shakespeare, the Bible, etc.
• Arrival of computers in 1950s of course changed
  everything

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Brown corpus

• First modern computer-readable corpus
• W.N. Francis and H. Kucera, Brown University,
  Providence, RI
• one million words of American English texts
  printed in 1961
• sampled from 15 different text categories
• used as model for other corpora, including

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LOB corpus

• compiled by researchers in Lancaster, Oslo and
  Bergen
• one million words of British English texts
  printed in 1961
• sampled from same 15 text categories as Brown
  corpus
• All texts 2,000 words long
• Kolhapur corpus of Indian English compiled in
  1978 to same sepcification

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Chomskys criticisms

• Chomskys ideas drove linguists away from
  empiricism (data) towards rationalism
  (introspection)
• Chomsky switched focus onto abstract models of
  language competence
• He was especially scathing about corpus-based
  approaches
• Based on mistaken view that corpus linguists
  confused finiteness of data with finiteness of
  language
• See McEnery Wilson, chapter 1

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The London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English (LLC)

• First corpus of transcribed spoken language
• Part of Survey of Spoken English at Lund
  University under the direction of J. Svartvik
• 500,000 words of spoken British English recorded
  from 1953 to 1987
• different categories, such as spontaneous
  conversation, spontaneous commentary, spontaneous
  and prepared oration

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COBUILD

• 1m-word corpus too small for many applications
• 1980 Collins instigated collection of 20m-word
  corpus to support lexicographers writing new
  Collins Birmingham University International
  Learners Dictionary (John Sinclair)
• Now expanded to Bank of English corpus, 320m
  words and growing
• www.collins.co.uk/Corpus/CorpusSearch.aspx
• www.collins.co.uk/books.aspx?group153

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BNC (1995)

• http//www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/
• 100m word collection of written and spoken text
  from 1975-93 (already dated in some respects!)
• Carefully designed and balanced
• Corpus is closed (finite, synchronic)
• All text tagged to high quality
• Lots of tools available for exploration

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etc.

• Many other corpus projects now underway,
  sometimes modelled on BNC or other well-known
  corpora
• Various national projects
• Specialized corpora
• Historical texts
• Learner English
• International English
• Translated English
• Spoken dialogues for certain domains
• When widely used, they become a kind of
  benchmark, eg Wall Street Journal corpus
  (treebank)
• This can have pros and cons