Overcoming Challenges in Corpus Construction


Book Description

This volume offers a critical examination of the construction of the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (Spoken BNC2014) and points the way forward toward a more informed understanding of corpus linguistic methodology more broadly. The book begins by situating the creation of this second corpus, a compilation of new, publicly-accessible Spoken British English from the 2010s, within the context of the first, created in 1994, talking through the need to balance backward capability and optimal practice for today’s users. Chapters subsequently use the Spoken BNC2014 as a focal point around which to discuss the various considerations taken into account in corpus construction, including design, data collection, transcription, and annotation. The volume concludes by reflecting on the successes and limitations of the project, as well as the broader utility of the corpus in linguistic research, both in current examples and future possibilities. This exciting new contribution to the literature on linguistic methodology is a valuable resource for students and researchers in corpus linguistics, applied linguistics, and English language teaching.




The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics


Book Description

The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics 2e provides an updated overview of a dynamic and rapidly growing area with a widely applied methodology. Over a decade on from the first edition of the Handbook, this collection of 47 chapters from experts in key areas offers a comprehensive introduction to both the development and use of corpora as well as their ever-evolving applications to other areas, such as digital humanities, sociolinguistics, stylistics, translation studies, materials design, language teaching and teacher development, media discourse, discourse analysis, forensic linguistics, second language acquisition and testing. The new edition updates all core chapters and includes new chapters on corpus linguistics and statistics, digital humanities, translation, phonetics and phonology, second language acquisition, social media and theoretical perspectives. Chapters provide annotated further reading lists and step-by-step guides as well as detailed overviews across a wide range of themes. The Handbook also includes a wealth of case studies that draw on some of the many new corpora and corpus tools that have emerged in the last decade. Organised across four themes, moving from the basic start-up topics such as corpus building and design to analysis, application and reflection, this second edition remains a crucial point of reference for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars in applied linguistics.




Metaphor and Corpus Linguistics


Book Description

Metaphor and Corpus Linguistics: Building and Investigating an English as a Medium of Instruction Corpus offers a model for building a corpus of oral EMI seminars. It demonstrates how incorporating metaphor to the process of corpus building affords a more comprehensive description of the role of metaphor in discourse. EMI is the specific context outlined in this volume, and as such it will be of particular interest to researchers in this area, though the design and model can be easily generalised and applied to other corpora focusing on metaphor. Alejo-González argues for the need to build such a corpus given the scarcity of corpora being tagged for metaphor as well as the shortage of those dealing with the EMI phenomenon. This book will be of practical use and interest to those researchers of corpus linguistics or related areas looking to explore metaphor through their corpus studies.




Analysing Representation


Book Description

Analysing Representation: A Corpus and Discourse Textbook guides readers through the process of researching how people and phenomena are represented in discourse and introduces them to key tools they can use from corpus linguistics and (critical) discourse analysis. This book takes a step-by-step approach to introducing each concept and includes exercises and further reading to help readers check their progress and prepare for independent research. It is unique in introducing readers to a range of experts representing the full range of work in this area. This book is aimed at final-year undergraduate, taught postgraduate and doctoral level students. It wil also be useful to scholars who are new to combining corpus and discourse methods in investigations of representation.




Broadening the Spectrum of Corpus Linguistics


Book Description

This volume presents a snapshot of the current state of the art of research in English corpus linguistics. It contains selected papers from the 40th ICAME conference in 2019 and features contributions from experts in synchronic, diachronic, and contrastive linguistics, as well as in sociolinguistics, phonetics, discourse analysis, and learner language. The volume showcases the particular strengths of research in the ICAME tradition. The papers in this volume offer new insights from the reanalysis of new data types, methodological refinements and advancements of quantitative analysis, and from taking new perspectives on ongoing debates in their respective fields.




Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies


Book Description

The breadth and spread of corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) indicate its usefulness for exploring language use within a social context. However, its theoretical foundations, limitations, and its epistemological implications must be considered so that we can adjust our research designs accordingly. This Element focuses on important meta-level questions around epistemology, while also offering a compact guide to which corpus linguistic tools are available and how they can contribute to finding out more about discourse. This Element will appeal to researchers both new and experienced, both within the CADS community and beyond.




Fundamental Principles of Corpus Linguistics


Book Description

How might evidence of language use – writing and speech – be used as a way of studying language? Corpus linguistics is the study of linguistic data from a particular language or set of languages. It is a fast-moving approach to studying language, and there is still a degree of divergence in how research questions are approached using corpus data. This book uses a framework, based on the work of Karl Popper, to explore a number of fundamental issues in corpus linguistics. It critically evaluates how these issues are tackled, and proposes a set of best practices for future research. 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. It is essential reading for researchers and students of language in general, and of applied linguistics and English language in particular.




English Corpus Linguistics


Book Description

Corpus linguistics is a research method which draws on authentic language examples, collected and organized into 'corpora', or searchable 'bodies' of data. The method was established in the 1960s, and has rapidly developed since then. Now in its second edition, this book provides a step-by-step guide on how to create and analyze linguistic corpora. It has been extensively updated to reflect the most recent developments in this ever-evolving field, and now covers the empirical foundation of corpus-based research, new methodological considerations that guide the creation of a corpus, new kinds of research that can be conducted on corpora, and the most up-to-date information on how qualitative and quantitative analyses of corpora are conducted. Theoretical approaches are introduced in an accessible, easy-to-read way, and the book is illustrated with a wide range of different linguistic corpora, making it essential reading for researchers and students in a number of subfields of linguistics.




Corpus Approaches to Language in Social Media


Book Description

This book showcases the unique possibilities of corpus linguistic methodologies in engaging with and analysing language data from social media, surveying current approaches, and offering guidelines and best practices for doing language analysis. The book provides an overview of how language in social media has been approached by linguists and non-linguists, before delving into the identification of the datasets requirements needed to pursue investigations in social media, and of the technical aspects of particular platforms that may influence the analysis, such as emoticons, retweets, and metadata. Sample Python code, along with general guidelines for using it, is provided to empower researchers to apply these techniques in their own work, supported by actual examples from three real-life case studies. Di Cristofaro highlights the full potential of using these methodologies in analysing social media language data and the ways in which they might pave the way for future applications of data analysis and processing for corpus linguistics. The book will be key reading for researchers in corpus linguistics and linguists and social scientists interested in data-driven analysis of social media.




Corpus Linguistics for Oral History


Book Description

Corpus Linguistics for Oral History takes a step-by-step approach to presenting how corpus linguistics tools and techniques can be applied to oral history archives. Bridging the gap between the two areas, this book: establishes a framework to pursue this type of research and guides the reader through tasks that will ensure practical application shows how oral narratives can facilitate historical linguistics, including historical sociolinguistics and historical pragmatics illustrates how the techniques of corpus linguistics can help social historians to analyse oral narratives in new and fruitful ways takes readers through each step of the process, from initial close readings of data to constructing a corpus that adheres to parameters of representativeness, through to the application of various corpus linguistics techniques includes an appendix of resources and examples of extracts from a global range of historical texts throughout, introducing the reader to a range of freely accessible, digitized archives This book is key reading for students and researchers working in History and Corpus Linguistics. History students will find a new perspective on approaching primary historical sources, while linguistics students will find insights into an avenue of data worthy of multiple levels of linguistic analysis.