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Researching language with computers

Researching language with computers. Paul Thompson. What is a corpus?. A collection of texts assumed to be representative of a given language, dialect, or other subset of a language, to be used for linguistic analysis (Francis 1982:7)

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Researching language with computers

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  1. Researching language with computers Paul Thompson

  2. What is a corpus? A collection of texts assumed to be representative of a given language, dialect, or other subset of a language, to be used for linguistic analysis (Francis 1982:7) A large and principled collection of natural texts (Biber, Conrad and Reppen 1998:4) A representative sample of a particular language or subset of that language (Bowker and Pearson 2002: 10)

  3. Corpus examples Complete works of Shakespeare The Guardian newspaper, 2003 Samples of written and spoken language in one decade (e.g. British National Corpus) Your set texts for this year

  4. What is Corpus Linguistics? The study of language through the analysis of text collections (usually these are ‘authentic’ texts)

  5. Opposing theories McEnery & Wilson (see ICT4LT website) Linguistics pre-Chomsky was mainly empiricist, but Chomsky’s early writings led to a rationalist approach. Empiricist – observation of naturally occurring data Rationalist – based on artificial behavioural data, and conscious introspective judgements

  6. Chomsky’s criticisms The linguist must seek to model language competence rather than performance Language is not a finite set, but corpora are finite Grammaticality judgements depend on intuition

  7. Power of computers Store Search Retrieve Calculate Sort

  8. Corpus analysis Can tell us what is probable (vs what is possible) in language Is concerned with patterns and frequencies

  9. What can you do with corpora? Find out which words and what grammar is typical of a particular kind of discourse Do lexicographical work Compare languages Study language change Create models of language and test them

  10. More terms Concordance lines A set of lines with a search term shown in the middle and a certain amount of words on either side Collocation The cooccurrence of words within a close range that is more frequent than chance. For example, humour collocates with dry, sense of and black

  11. What are the different types of corpus? General Tagged (coded) Written Diachronic Entire texts Entire works Reference Ready-made Expert Specialised Untagged Spoken Synchronic Samples Sampling Exemplar User-made Learner

  12. Concordance learning Collocation Colligation Semantic features Pragmatic features

  13. Concordancing programmes Wordsmith Tools MonoConc Pro ConcApp AntConc

  14. Online concordancers COBUILD sampler (40) BNC (50) Sketch Engine WebCorp Compleat Lexical Tutor Spaceless.com http://spaceless.com/concordancer.php

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