Corpus Linguistics

Objectives of the course

What is corpus linguistics, what is corpus and how it can be made useful. Teaching the students to perform corpus analysis individually.

Prerequisites

In order to successfully participate in in-class discussions and to follow the lectures, the student should take the introductory linguistic courses. This course is related to other courses in the Language curriculum.

Assessment methods

Attending lectures, a term paper, active participation in in-class discussions.

Course contents

Initially the historical background of corpus linguistics is presented. Forming a corpus and tagging it are presented for various types of corpora. The way a corpus is made also determines the way it can be used and the analytical tools that can be used on it. A major part is devoted to the language specific lexical analyses and various sample language descriptions made using corpora which are critically evaluated. Special attention is also devoted to methods and tools for keeping and organizing processed language data and individual development of a standardized tagged corpus.

Material discussed in lectures also forms the main part of recitations, where more time and care is devoted to the main issues. Emphasis is given to practical knowledge and actual analysis of language data.

Recommended reading

• Adam Kilgariff: Word sketches http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/~Adam.Kilgarriff/wordsketch es.html
• WordNet http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/
• Douglas Biber et. al., 1998: Corpus Linguistics. Investigation Language Structure in Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Corpus Linguistics Around the World, 2006. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi.
• Graeme Kennedy, 1998: An Introduction to Corpus Linguistics. London: Longamn.
• Conference proceedings and various journals