Corpus Linguistics in Research

Doctorate in Education

University of Warwick

6th November 2008

Aims

Understanding key termsUnderstanding relation to research

paradigmsConsideration of usefulness to own

contextPractice in hands-on use of a corpus tool

Key Terms

Corpus LinguisticsCorpus and corporaLemmaConcordance

Discussion

1. What do you know about corpus linguistics or corpus approaches?

2. Have you seen online concordancers?

3. Have you ever used a corpus tool (such as Wordsmith Tools)? What did you do with it?

4. Have you considered using a corpus approach as part of your project? Why/ why not?

Research Issues

Competence or Performance? The influence of Chomsky on corpus research

Quantitative or Qualitative? Perceived as quantitative and so harder to fit it to new approaches

Positivist or Social Constructionist? - ‘Number crunching’ and statistics suggest it is a ‘scientific’ approach - less popular

Technology-driven? - is research restricted to what is possible on a computer?

Advantages

Can mitigate inevitable bias of Discourse Analysis

Uncovering semantic prosody - the implicit negative or positive ‘flavour’ of a collocation

Looking at language change over timeUseful for triangulation of data

‘confirming suspicions’

Types of Corpus

Specialised Corpora - usually small and tightly focused

Sampling / Representative Corpora - early approach taking equal amounts of a variety of texts

Diachronic Corpora - to track changes over time

Reference Corpus - can be huge but no corpus can represent ‘the language’ (eg BNC)

Monitor Corpus - kept up to date (eg BoE)

How to Manipulate a Corpus?

BNC and BoE provide own search engines - not easily customised

Stand alone corpora can use stand alone concordancers, eg WordSmith Tools, AntConc, MicroConcord

Possible actions - wordlist, concordance lines for a word, collocates, clusters, key words (of a smaller corpus compared to a larger one)

Hands-on

Open a browser and put AntConc into Google

Go to Lawrence Anthony’s website and download AntConc 3.1

Click on ‘Open Files’ and choose a ‘corpus’

Make a Wordlist.

Wordlist Discussion

Look at the WordlistWhich are the most frequent words and

why?What are the top 5 ‘lexical’ words in your

list? Do the most frequent words help to

reveal any special features of the corpus?

Concordance Discussion

Scroll down the word list and choose a word that interests you.

You will see a concordance is automatically generated.

What does this reveal about the word? (position in the sentence, punctuation, immediate collocates on the left and right)

Try sorting the words on the left or right.

Cluster Discussion

Click on clusters - this reveals the ‘lexical chunks’ of which this word is a part

Are there any interesting patterns there?How useful is it to research lexical

chunks?

Caveat

“Acknowledging what a corpus-based approach can do and what it cannot do is necessary, but should not mean that we discard the methodology altogether - we should just be more clear about when it is appropriate to use it or employ some other method.” (Baker, 2006:7)