Corpora Galore

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.

This book discusses key issues of corpus linguistics like the definition of the corpus, primary features of a corpus, and utilization and limitations of corpora. It presents a unique classification scheme of language corpora to show how they can be studied from the perspective of genre, nature, text type, purpose, and application. A reference to parallel translation corpus is mandatory in the discussion of corpus generation, which the authors thoroughly address here, with a focus on Indian language corpora and English. Web-text corpus, a new development in corpus linguistics, is also discussed with elaborate reference to Indian web text corpora. The book also presents a short history of corpus generation and provides scenarios before and after the advent of computer-generated digital corpora. This book has several important features: it discusses many technical issues of the field in a lucid manner; contains extensive new diagrams and charts for easy comprehension; and presents discussions in simplified English to cater to the needs of non-native English readers. This is an important resource authored by academics who have many years of experience teaching and researching corpus linguistics. Its focus on Indian languages and on English corpora makes it applicable to students of graduate and postgraduate courses in applied linguistics, computational linguistics and language processing in South Asia and across countries where English is spoken as a first or second language.

Corpus-aided language pedagogy is one of the central application areas of corpus methodologies, and a test bed for theories of language and learning. This volume provides an overview of current trends, offering methodological and theoretical position statements along with results from empirical studies. The relationship between corpora and learning is examined from complementary perspectives — the study of learner language, the didactic use of corpus findings, and the interaction between corpora and their users. Reflections on current theory and technology open and close the volume.With its focus on the learner and the learning setting, Corpora and Language Learners is addressed to corpus linguists with an interest in learner language, applied linguists wishing to expand their understanding of corpora and their pedagogic potential, and language teachers wishing to critically assess the relevance of work in this field. This volume grew out of selected presentations at the 5th Teaching and Language Corpora conference in Bertinoro, Italy.

This volume presents current state-of-the-art discussions in corpus-based linguistic research of the English language. The papers deal with Present-day English, worldwide varieties of English and the history of the English language. A special focus of the volume are studies in the broad field of corpus pragmatics and corpus-based discourse analysis. It includes corpus-based studies of speech acts, conversational routines, referential expressions and thought styles, as well as studies on the lexis, grammar and semantics of English. And it also includes several studies on technical aspects of corpus compilation, fieldwork and parsing.

This book unites a range of approaches to the collection and digitization of diverse language corpora. Its specific focus is on best practices identified in the exploitation of these resources in landmark impact initiatives across different parts of the globe. The development of increasingly accessible digital corpora has coincided with improvements in the standards governing the collection, encoding and archiving of ‘Big Data’. Less attention has been paid to the importance of developing standards for enriching and preserving other types of corpus data, such as that which captures the nuances of regional dialects, for example. This book takes these best practices another step forward by addressing innovative methods for enhancing and exploiting specialized corpora so that they become accessible to wider audiences beyond the academy.

This book takes stock of current research into computer learner corpora conducted both by ELT and SLA specialists. It should be of particular interest to researchers looking to assess its relevance to SLA theory and ELT practice. Throughout the volume, emphasis is also placed on practical, methodological aspects of computer learner corpus research, in particular the contribution of technology to the research process. The advantages and disadvantages of automated and semi-automated approaches are analyzed, the capabilities of linguistic software tools investigated, the corpora (and compilation processes) described in detail. In this way, an important function of the volume is to give practical insight to researchers who may be considering compiling a corpus of learner data or embarking on learner corpus research.The volume is divided into three main sections: • Section 1 gives a general overview of learner corpus research; • Section 2 illustrates a range of corpus-based approaches to interlanguage analysis; • Section 3 demonstrates the direct pedagogical relevance of learner corpus work.

The articles in this edited volume represent a broad coverage of areas. They discuss the role and effectiveness of corpora and corpus-linguistic techniques for language teaching but also deal with broader issues such as the relationship between corpora and second language teaching and how the different perspectives of foreign language teachers and applied linguists can be reconciled. A number of concrete examples are given of how authentic corpus material can be used for different learning activities in the classroom. It is also shown how specific learner problems for example in the area of phraseology can be studied on the basis of learner corpora and textbook corpora. On the basis of learner corpora of speech and writing it is further shown that even advanced learners of English are uncertain about stylistic and text type differences.