Mastering Corpus Linguistics Methods

This book provides a hands-on introduction to qualitative and especially quantitative corpus-linguistics methods, dealing with both the conceptual and the practical side of conducting corpus-linguistic case studies. The main focus of this book is to illustrate how a wide range of research questions can be tackled with corpus linguistic methods that involve only a modest number of technical hurdles as well as to gently guide the researcher through the technicalities of some more complex methods. Methods of Corpus Linguistics is aimed at a broad audience of linguists, presenting both basic and modern methods of corpus linguistics.

Corpora are used widely in linguistics, but not always wisely. This book attempts to frame corpus linguistics systematically as a variant of the observational method. The first part introduces the reader to the general methodological discussions surrounding corpus data as well as the practice of doing corpus linguistics, including issues such as the scientific research cycle, research design, extraction of corpus data and statistical evaluation. The second part consists of a number of case studies from the main areas of corpus linguistics (lexical associations, morphology, grammar, text and metaphor), surveying the range of issues studied in corpus linguistics while at the same time showing how they fit into the methodology outlined in the first part.

This book builds on Baker and Egbert’s previous work on triangulating methodological approaches in corpus linguistics and takes triangulation one step further to highlight its broader applicability when implemented with other linguistic research methods. The volume showcases research methods from other linguistic disciplines and draws on ten empirical studies from a range of topics in psycholinguistics, applied linguistics, and discourse analysis to demonstrate how these methods might be most effectively triangulated with corpus-linguistic methods. A concluding chapter synthesizes these findings as a means of pointing the way toward future directions for triangulation and its implications for future linguistic research. The combined effect reveals the potential for the triangulation of these methods to not only enhance rigor in empirical linguistic research but also our understanding of linguistic phenomena and variation by studying them from multiple perspectives, making this book essential reading for graduate students and researchers in corpus linguistics, applied linguistics, psycholinguistics, and discourse analysis.

This handbook is a comprehensive practical resource on corpus linguistics. It features a range of basic and advanced approaches, methods and techniques in corpus linguistics, from corpus compilation principles to quantitative data analyses. The Handbook is organized in six Parts. Parts I to III feature chapters that discuss key issues and the know-how related to various topics around corpus design, methods and corpus types. Parts IV-V aim to offer a user-friendly introduction to the quantitative analysis of corpus data: for each statistical technique discussed, chapters provide a practical guide with R and come with supplementary online material. Part VI focuses on how to write a corpus linguistic paper and how to meta-analyze corpus linguistic research. The volume can serve as a course book as well as for individual study. It will be an essential reading for students of corpus linguistics as well as experienced researchers who want to expand their knowledge of the field.

Paradoxically, doing corpus linguistics is both easier and harder than it has ever been before. On the one hand, it is easier because we have access to more existing corpora, more corpus analysis software tools, and more statistical methods than ever before. On the other hand, reliance on these existing corpora and corpus linguistic methods can potentially create layers of distance between the researcher and the language in a corpus, making it a challenge to do linguistics with a corpus. The goal of this Element is to explore ways for us to improve how we approach linguistic research questions with quantitative corpus data. We introduce and illustrate the major steps in the research process, including how to: select and evaluate corpora, establish linguistically-motivated research questions, observational units and variables, select linguistically interpretable variables, understand and evaluate existing corpus software tools, adopt minimally sufficient statistical methods, and qualitatively interpret quantitative findings.

Corpus Linguistics for World Englishes offers a detailed account of how to analyse the many fascinating varieties of English around the world using corpus-linguistic methods. Employing case studies for illustration of relevant concepts and methods throughout, this book: introduces the theory and practice of analysing World Englishes illustrates the basics of corpus-linguistic methods and presents the vast World Englishes corpora links World Englishes to Learner Englishes and English as a Lingua Franca offers practical, hands-on exercises and questions for discussion in each chapter provides helpful overviews and course syllabi for students and instructors. Corpus Linguistics for World Englishes is key reading for advanced students of English as a World Language and Corpus Linguistics, as well as anyone keen to understand variation in World Englishes with the help of corpus linguistics.

Contemporary corpus linguists use a wide variety of methods to study discourse patterns. This volume provides a systematic comparison of various methodological approaches in corpus linguistics through a series of parallel empirical studies that use a single corpus dataset to answer the same overarching research question. Ten contributing experts each use a different method to address the same broadly framed research question: In what ways does language use in online Q+A forum responses differ across four world English varieties (India, Philippines, United Kingdom, and United States)? Contributions will be based on analysis of the same 400,000 word corpus from online Q+A forums, and contributors employ methodologies including corpus-based discourse analysis, audience perceptions, Multi-Dimensional analysis, pragmatic analysis, and keyword analysis. In their introductory and concluding chapters, the volume editors compare and contrast the findings from each method and assess the degree to which ‘triangulating’ multiple approaches may provide a more nuanced understanding of a research question, with the aim of identifying a set of complementary approaches which could arguably take into account analytical blind spots. Baker and Egbert also consider the importance of issues such as researcher subjectivity, type of annotation, the limitations and affordances of different corpus tools, the relative strengths of qualitative and quantitative approaches, and the value of considering data or information beyond the corpus. Rather than attempting to find the ‘best’ approach, the focus of the volume is on how different corpus linguistic methodologies may complement one another, and raises suggestions for further methodological studies which use triangulation to enrich corpus-related research.