Corpora
A corpus (pl. corpora) is a collection of written or spoken material in machine-readable form, assembled for the purpose of studying linguistic structures.
Generally, corpora are assembled according to predefined criteria to fit intended aims such as studying linguistic structures, machine translation or natural language processing. Building a corpus is a time consuming task.
This section introduces the following resources:
- Licensed datasets from the Linguistic Data Consortium
- Web-based corpora from various languages and language families
- Guides for statistical analysis of linguistic data
The following titles provide a good starting point for students who are new to corpus-based research:
Corpus-Based Language Studies: An advanced resource book by Publication Date: 2006Corpus-Based Language Studies covers the major theoretical approaches to the use of corpus data and adopts a 'how to' approach with exercises and cases, affording students the knowledge and tools to undertake their own corpus-based research.
Doing Corpus Linguistics by Publication Date: 2015Doing Corpus Linguistics offers a practical step-by-step introduction to corpus linguistics, making use of widely available corpora and of a register analysis-based theoretical framework to provide students in Applied Linguistics and TESOL with the understanding and skills necessary to meaningfully analyze corpora and carry out successful corpus-based research.
Corpus Linguistics by Publication Date: 2012This textbook outlines the basic methods of corpus linguistics, explains how the discipline developed and surveys major approaches to the use of corpus data. Practical tasks and questions for discussion at the end of each chapter encourage students to test their understanding of what they have read and an extensive glossary provides easy access to definitions used in the text.
The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics by Publication Date: 2021The second edition of The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics provides an updated overview of a dynamic and rapidly growing area with a widely applied methodology. It is structured around four themes which take the reader from the basic start-up topics, such as corpus building and design, to analysis, application and reflection.
The Fundamental Principles of Corpus Linguistics by Publication Date: 2022This book uses a framework, based on the work of Karl Popper, to explore a number of fundamental issues in corpus linguistics. It spells out why using corpus data is valuable, what we can learn from using it, and how we may most effectively progress our understanding of language by using such data.
