History Features And Typology Of Language Corpora

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.

Investigating the history of a language depends on fragmentary sources, but electronic corpora offer the possibility of alleviating the problem of 'bad data'. But they cannot overcome it totally, and questions arise of the optimal architecture for a corpus and its representativeness of actual language use, and how a historical corpus can best be annotated to maximize its usefulness. Immense strides have been made in recent years in addressing these questions, with exciting new methods and technological advances. The papers in this volume, which were presented at a conference on New Methods in Historical Corpora (Manchester 2011), exemplify the wide range of these recent developments.

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.

Corpora are well-established as a resource for language research; they are now also increasingly being used for teaching purposes. This book is the first of its kind to deal explicitly and in a wide-ranging way with the use of corpora in teaching. It contains an extensive collection of articles by corpus linguists and practising teachers, covering not only the use of data to inform and create teaching materials but also the direct exploitation of corpora by students, both in the study of linguistics in general and in the acquisition of proficiency in individual languages, including English, Welsh, German, French and Italian. In addition, the book offers practical information on the sources of corpora and concordances, including those suitable for work on non-roman scripts such as Greek and Cyrillic.

This book addresses the research, analysis, and description of the methods and processes that are used in the annotation and processing of language corpora in advanced, semi-advanced, and non-advanced languages. It provides the background information and empirical data needed to understand the nature and depth of problems related to corpus annotation and text processing and shows readers how the linguistic elements found in texts are analyzed and applied to develop language technology systems and devices. As such, it offers valuable insights for researchers, educators, and students of linguistics and language technology.

This book discusses some of the basic issues relating to corpus generation and the methods normally used to generate a corpus. Since corpus-related research goes beyond corpus generation, the book also addresses other major topics connected with the use and application of language corpora, namely, corpus readiness in the context of corpus sanitation and pre-editing of corpus texts; the application of statistical methods; and various text processing techniques. Importantly, it explores how corpora can be used as a primary or secondary resource in English language teaching, in creating dictionaries, in word sense disambiguation, in various language technologies, and in other branches of linguistics. Lastly, the book sheds light on the status quo of corpus generation in Indian languages and identifies current and future needs. Discussing various technical issues in the field in a lucid manner, providing extensive new diagrams and charts for easy comprehension, and using simplified English, the book is an ideal resource for non-native English readers. Written by academics with many years of experience teaching and researching corpus linguistics, its focus on Indian languages and on English corpora makes it applicable to graduate and postgraduate students of applied linguistics, computational linguistics and language processing in South Asia and across countries where English is spoken as a first or second language.

Using Corpora to Explore Linguistic Variation illustrates the ways in which linguistic variation can be explored through corpus-based investigation. Two major kinds of research questions are considered: variation in the use of a particular linguistic feature, and variation across dialects or registers. Part 1: “Exploring variation in the use of linguistic features” focuses on the study of specific words, expressions, or grammatical constructions, to study variation in the use of a particular linguistic feature. Part 2: “Exploring dialect and register variation” describes salient characteristics of dialects or registers and the patterns of variation across varieties. Part 3: “Exploring Historical Variation” applies these same two major perspectives to historical variation. One recurring theme is the extent to which linguistic variation depends on register differences, reflecting the importance of register as a key methodological and thematic concern in current corpus linguistic research.