2. “Corpus linguistics is the study of language as
expressed in corpora (samples) of "real world"
text.”
3. Example
For Example, a teacher that has been teaching for two years conducts a
corpus analysis.
“Questions”
1. What are the three most frequent words used by the students in their
writing?
2. How do they use these words in their writing?
4. Steps
1. Teacher will collect all student’s writings.
2. Calculate the number of words used by them.
3. Generate frequency list of all these words and rank them.
5. Result
Total no. of words: 120
The three most frequent words: the, for, it
Word Occurrence
The 48
For 24
It 20
6. Corpora
“Corpora are a large and structured set of texts (nowadays
usually electronically stored and processed).They are used
to do statistical analysis and hypothesis testing.
7. Notable English language corpora include the following:
The American National Corpus (ANC).
British National Corpus (BNC).
The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).
The International Corpus of English (ICE).
9. Speech Corpus
“A speech corpus (or spoken corpus) is a database of speech audio files
and text transcriptions. In linguistics, spoken corpora are used to do
research into phonetics, conversation analysis, dialectology and other
fields.”
11. Read speech which includes:
1. Book excerpts
2. Broadcast news
3. Lists of words
12. Spontaneous Speech, which
includes:
1. Dialogues: between two or more people (includes meetings).
2. Narratives: a person telling a story.
3. Map-tasks: one person explains a route on a map to another.
13. Text Corpus
A text corpus is a very large collection of text (often many billion words)
produced by real users of the language and used to analyze how words,
phrases and language in general are used. It is used by linguists,
lexicographers, social scientists, humanities, experts in natural language
processing and in many other fields.
15. 1. Monolingual corpus
A monolingual corpus is the most frequent type of corpus. It contains texts in one
language only. The corpus is usually tagged for parts of speech used by a wide
range of users for various tasks from highly practical ones.
16. Checking the correct usage of a word or looking up the most natural
word combinations, to scientific use, e.g. identifying frequent
patterns or new trends in language.
Example
17. 2. Parallel Corpus
A parallel corpus consists of two monolingual corpora. One corpus
is the translation of the other. Both languages need to be aligned,
i.e. corresponding segments, usually sentences or paragraphs, need
to be matched. The user can then search for all examples of a word
or phrase in one language and the results will be displayed
together with the corresponding sentences in the other language.
18. Example
For example, a novel and its translation or a translation memory of a
CAT tool could be used to build a parallel corpus.
19. 3. Multilingual corpus
A multilingual corpus is very similar to a parallel corpus. The two terms
are often used interchangeably. A multilingual corpus contains texts in
several languages which are all translations of the same text and are
aligned in the same way as parallel corpora. Sketch Engine allows the
user to select more than two aligned corpora and the search will display
the translation into all the languages simultaneously. When only two
languages are selected, a multilingual corpus behaves as a parallel
corpus. The user can also decide to work with one language to use it as a
monolingual corpus.
20. Example
For example, the Aarthus corpus of Danish, French and English contract
law consists of a set of three monolingual law corpora, which is not
comprised of translations of the same texts.
21. 4. Comparable Corpus
A comparable corpus is a set of two or more monolingual corpora,
typically each in a different language, built according to the same
principles. When users search these corpora they can use the fact, that
the corpora also have the same metadata.
22. Example
International Corpus of English (ICE) are comparable corpora of 1 million words
each of different varieties of English
23. 5. Learner Corpus
A learner corpus is a corpus of texts produced by learners of a language.
The corpus is used to study the mistakes and problems learners have
when learning a foreign language. Sketch Engine allows for learner
corpora to be annotated for the type of error and provides a special
interface to search either for the error itself, for the error correction, for
the error type or for a combination of the three options.
24. Example
1. Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNEE)
2. International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE)
25. 6. Diachronic Corpus
A diachronic corpus is a corpus containing texts from different periods
and is used to study the development or change in language. Sketch
Engine allows searching the corpus as a whole or only includes selected
time intervals into the search. In addition, there is a specialized
diachronic feature called Trends, which identifies words whose usage
changes the most of the selected period of time.
27. 7. Specialized Corpus
A specialized corpus contains texts limited to one or more subject areas,
domains, topics etc. Such corpus is used to study how the specialized
language is used. It is used to investigate a particular type of language.
28. Example
1. Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English (CANCODE)
(informal registers of British English) – 5 million words.
2. Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) (spoken
registers in a US academic setting) – 5 million words.
29. 8. Multimedia Corpus
A multimedia corpus contains texts which are enhanced with audio or
visual materials or other type of multimedia content.
30. Example
The spoken part of British National Corpus in Sketch Engine has links to
the corresponding recordings which can be played from the Sketch
Engine interface.
31. Conclusion
Corpus Linguistics can help in telling about language use and how it varies
in different situations. Corpus linguistics allows us to see how language is
used today and how that language is used in different contexts, enabling us
to teach language more effectively.
