Corpus Linguistics

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Corpus Linguistics
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What is corpus linguistics?

• Method / Theory in Linguistics
• Analysis of collections of texts (corpora)
• Verifying/ Strengthening or weakening of
  hypotheses through statistics
• -gt quantitative textual analysis

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A little history

• 1897 Käding analyzed manually a corpus of
  11 million words
• 1967er Henry Cucera and Nelson Francis
  analyzed the Brown Corpus of
  American English (computer-assisted)
• 1970-90 The number of computer-assisted
  linguistic analyses was doubled / 5yrs
• E.g. 2007, latest
• update of the BNC 100-million-word corpus

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Corpus Analysis?

• Tools and concordance programs (e.g. Wordsmith,
  Zaira)
• Concordance a word in ist immediate co-text
• Different types of corpora
• general (e.g. BNC), specific (some criteria
  topic, genre, author)

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Who uses it and where?

• Compilation of dictionaries
• Linguistist, Language teachers, etc.
• -gtDescriptions of language and its variations
  (e.g. sociolects, dialects)
• Discourse Analysis, i.e. linguistic phenomena in
  various discourse types (z.B. news papers,
  novels,etc.)

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Corpus Analysis and CDA

• Approach -gt Language does not reflect reality
  we construct reality through language
• Langauge plays an important role in the
  construction and maintainance of ideologies
• ? it neutralizes and naturalizes inequalities of
  power and money
• Corpus Analysis is used as a method to discover
  certain societal patterns and ideologies (within
  this approach)

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Wordsmith

• is a collection of corpus linguistics tools for
  looking for patterns in a language/discourse/texts
  (s).
• Mike Scott, University of Liverpool,
  www.lexically.net
• Wordlist orders words in a corpus
  alphabetically, according to frequency and other
  statistical information
• Concord concordances, collocates
• Keywords compares the frequency of words within
  two corpora