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