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Corpus Linguistics
What is corpus linguistics?
• Method / Theory in Linguistics
• Analysis of collections of texts (corpora)
• Verifying/ Strengthening or weakening of hypotheses through statistics
-> quantitative textual analysis
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
…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…)
Who uses it and where?
• Compilation of dictionaries
• Linguistist, Language teachers, etc.
->Descriptions of language and it‘s variations (e.g. sociolects, dialects…)
• Discourse Analysis, i.e. linguistic phenomena in various discourse types (z.B. news papers, novels,etc.)
Corpus Analysis and CDA• Approach -> 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)
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
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