Corpus Linguistics.pptVIP

Corpus Linguistics Members: Yao Yin Zhanlian Wang Dan Ai Yan Sun Li Li Xu Wenhui Date: October 28, 2013 Outline Corpus Corpus Linguistics Types of Corpora Applications of Corpus Analysis Methods Basic notions Corpus: A collection of naturally occurring language text, chosen to characterise a state or variety of language (Sinclair) A collection of linguistic data, either written text or a transcription of recorded data, which can be used as starting-point of linguistic description or as a means of verifying hypotheses about a language (Dictionary of linguistics and phonetics) What is a corpus? Large body of evidence typically composed of attested language use (McEnery) Usually a corpus is in machine-readable format and is ideally viewable and analysable through (a single) software package The word corpus comes from Latin body and the plural is corpora Corpus linguistics Corpus linguistics, the study of language as expressed in samples (corpora) of real world text. This method represents a digestive approach to deriving a set of abstract rules by which a natural language is governed or else relates to another language. Originally done by hand, corpora are now largely derived by an automated process. Corpus linguistics adherents believe that reliable language analysis best occurs on field-collected samples, in natural contexts and with minimal experimental interference. History We have to split the history in two periods: early corpus linguistics, also known as pre-Chomsky corpus linguistics and - modern corpus linguistics Before Chomsky, methods similar to the ones in corpus linguistics were used (empiricism) Early Corpus Linguistics The early examples of corpus linguistics date to the late 19th century Germany (J. Kading used a large corpus consisting of about 11 million words to analyse distribution of the letters and their sequences in German language.) Franz Boas (Handbook of Native American