Corpus Linguistics And The Web

Using the Web as Corpus is one of the recent challenges for corpus linguistics. This volume presents a current state-of-the-arts discussion of the topic. The articles address practical problems such as suitable linguistic search tools for accessing the www, the question of register variation, or they probe into methods for culling data from the web. The book also offers a wide range of case studies, covering morphology, syntax, lexis, as well as synchronic and diachronic variation in English. These case studies make use of the two approaches to the www in corpus linguistics – web-as-corpus and web-for-corpus-building. The case studies demonstrate that web data can provide useful additional evidence for a broad range of research questions.

Is the internet a suitable linguistic corpus? How can we use it in corpus techniques? What are the special properties that we need to be aware of? This book answers those questions. The Web is an exponentially increasing source of language and corpus linguistics data. From gigantic static information resources to user-generated Web 2.0 content, the breadth and depth of information available is breathtaking – and bewildering. This book explores the theory and practice of the “web as corpus”. It looks at the most common tools and methods used and features a plethora of examples based on the author's own teaching experience. This book also bridges the gap between studies in computational linguistics, which emphasize technical aspects, and studies in corpus linguistics, which focus on the implications for language theory and use.

Corpus Linguistics for Online Communication provides an instructive and practical guide to conducting research using methods in corpus linguistics in studies of various forms of online communication. Offering practical exercises and drawing on original data taken from online interactions, this book: introduces the basics of corpus linguistics, including what is involved in designing and building a corpus; reviews cutting-edge studies of online communication using corpus linguistics, foregrounding different analytical components to facilitate studies in professional discourse, online learning, public understanding of health issues and dating apps; showcases both freely-available corpora and the innovative tools that students and researchers can access to carry out their own research. Corpus Linguistics for Online Communication supports researchers and students in generating high quality, applied research and is essential reading for those studying and researching in this area.

The first textbook of its kind, Quantitative Corpus Linguistics with R demonstrates how to use the open source programming language R for corpus linguistic analyses. Computational and corpus linguists doing corpus work will find that R provides an enormous range of functions that currently require several programs to achieve – searching and processing corpora, arranging and outputting the results of corpus searches, statistical evaluation, and graphing.

Covering the major approaches to the use of corpus data, this work gathers together influential readings from leading names in the discipline, including Biber, Widdowson, Sinclair, Carter and McCarthy.

Preliminary Material /Antoinette Renouf and Andrew Kehoe -- The corpus-user's chorus: (Based on The Major General's Song from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance) /Antoinette Renouf and Andrew Kehoe -- Introduction: The changing face of corpus linguistics /Antoinette Renouf and Andrew Kehoe -- Oh Canada! Towards the Corpus of Early Ontario English /Stefan Dollinger -- Favoring Americanisms? vs. before and in Early English in Australia: A corpus-based approach /Clemens Fritz -- Computing the Lexicons of Early Modern English /Ian Lancashire -- EFL dictionaries, grammars and language guides from 1700 to 1850: testing a new corpus on points of spokenness /Manfred Markus -- The Old English Apollonius of Tyre in the light of the Old English Concordancer /Antonio Miranda García , Javier Calle Martín , David Moreno Olalla and Gustavo Muñoz González -- Prediction with SHALL and WILL: a diachronic perspective /Maurizio Gotti -- Circumstantial adverbials in discourse: a synchronic and a diachronic perspective /Anneli Meurman-Solin and Päivi Pahta -- Changes in textual structures of book advertisements in the ZEN Corpus /Caren auf dem Keller -- “Curtains like these are selling right in the city of Chicago for USD 1.50” - The mediopassive in American 20th-century advertising language /Marianne Hundt -- Recent grammatical change in written English 1961-1992: some preliminary findings of a comparison of American with British English /Geoffrey Leech and Nicholas Smith -- Social variation in the use of apology formulae in the British National Corpus /Mats Deutschmann -- How recent is recent? On overcoming interpretational difficulties /Göran Kjellmer -- Looking at looking: Functions and contexts of progressives in spoken English and 'school' English /Ute Römer -- Ditransitives, the Given Before New principle, and textual retrievability: a corpus-based study using ICECUP /Gabriel Ozón -- The Spanish pragmatic marker pues and its English equivalents /Anna-Brita Stenström -- WebCorp: A tool for online linguistic information retrieval and analysis /Barry Morley -- Diachronic linguistic analysis on the web with WebCorp /Andrew Kehoe -- New ways of analysing ESL on the WWW with WebCorp and WebPhraseCount /Josef Schmied -- I'm like, “Hey, it works!”: Using GlossaNet to find attestations of the quotative (be) like in English-language newspapers /Cédrick Fairon and John V. Singler -- Corpus linguistics and English reference grammars /Joybrato Mukherjee -- Tracking ongoing grammatical change and recent diversification in present-day standard English: the complementary role of small and large corpora /Christian Mair -- but it will take time...points of view on a lexical grammar of English /Michaela Mahlberg -- Corpus linguistics, grammar and theory: Report on a panel discussion at the 24th ICAME conference /Jan Aarts.

This textbook introduces the fundamental concepts and methods of corpus linguistics for students approaching this topic for the first time, putting specific emphasis on the enormous linguistic diversity represented by approximately 7,000 human languages and broadening the scope of current concerns in general corpus linguistics. Including a basic toolkit to help the reader investigate language in different usage contexts, this book: Shows the relevance of corpora to a range of linguistic areas from phonology to sociolinguistics and discourse Covers recent developments in the application of corpus linguistics to the study of understudied languages and linguistic typology Features exercises, short problems, and questions Includes examples from real studies in over 15 languages plus multilingual corpora Providing the necessary corpus linguistics skills to critically evaluate and replicate studies, this book is essential reading for anyone studying corpus linguistics.