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What Is The Meaning Of Corpus Linguistics?

Corpus linguistics is a methodology that involves computer-based empirical analyses (both quantitative and qualitative) of language use by employing large, electronically available collections of naturally occurring spoken and written texts, so-called corpora.
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The word "corpus", derived from the Latin word meaning "body", may beused to refer to any text in written or spoken form.However, in modern Linguistics this term is used to refer to large collections of texts which represent a sample of a particular variety or use of language(s) that are presented in machine readable form. Other definitions, broader or stricter, exist. See, for example, the definition in the book "Corpus Linguistics" by Tony McEnery and Andrew Wilson or read more about different kinds of corpora in the Systematic Dictionary of Corpus Linguistics.

Computer-readable corpora can consist of raw text only,i.e. plain text with no additional information. Many corpora have been provided with some kind of linguistic information, here called mark-up or annotation.

Types of corpora

There are many different kinds of corpora. They can contain written or spoken (transcribed) language, modern or old texts, texts from one language or several languages. The texts can be whole books, newspapers, journals, speeches etc, or consist of extracts of varying length. The kind of texts included and the combination of different texts vary between different corpora and corpus types.

'General corpora' consist of general texts, texts that do not belong to a single text type, subject field, or register. An example of a general corpus is the British National Corpus.Some corpora contain texts that are sampled (chosen from) a particular variety of a language, for example, from a particular dialect or from a particular subject area. These corpora are sometimes called 'Sublanguage Corpora'.

Corpora can consist of texts in one language (or language variety) only or of texts in more than one language. If the texts are the same in all languages, e.i. translations, the corpus is called a ParallelCorpus. A ComparableCorpus is a collection of "similar" text

For a list of various corpora, click HERE

Corpora serve as the basis for a number of research tasks within the field of Corpus Linguistics.

8 Related questions Answers found

What is corpus linguistics examples?

An example of a general corpus is the British National Corpus. Some corpora contain texts that are sampled (chosen from) a particular variety of a language, for example, from a particular dialect or from a particular subject area. These corpora are sometimes called 'Sublanguage Corpora'.

What is Corpus Linguistics in English language Teaching?

Corpus linguistics studies take advantage of the existence of large collections of language production (written or spoken language) in order to investigate a language. It bases its descriptions on the empirical characteristics of language production (rather than chiefly on theory, or speaker intuition).

Who created corpus linguistics?

Written by Henry Kučera and W. Nelson Francis, the work was based on an analysis of the Brown Corpus, which was a contemporary compilation of about a million American English words, carefully selected from a wide variety of sources.

Who is the father of corpus linguistics?

London: Collins, p. 104-115. Sinclair is often called the father of modern corpus linguistics, and had a strong interest in pedagogical issues; this volume covers various aspects of the issues involved in compiling, annotation and exploiting the revolutionary COBUILD Bank Of English corpus.

What are the functions of corpus linguistics?

Corpus linguistics is a field of linguistics which studies large samples of naturally occurring language in order to better understand how the language is used. Computers have made it possible to examine and analyze millions of language samples.

Why do we use corpus?

Corpora are essential in particular for the study of spoken and signed language: while written language can be studied by examining the text, speech, signs and gestures disappear when they have been produced and thus, we need multimodal corpora in order to study interactive face-to- face communication.

When did corpus linguistics begin?

The modern field of corpus linguistics – based around the computer-aided analysis of extremely large databases of text – is largely a phenomenon of the late 1950s onwards.

What does psycholinguistics study?

Psycholinguistics is the field of study in which researchers investigate the psychological processes involved in the use of language, including language comprehension, language production, and first and second language acquisition.