The use of large, computerized bodies of text for linguistic analysis and description has emerged in recent years as one of the most significant and rapidly-developing fields of activity in the study of language. This book provides a comprehensive introduction and guide to Corpus Linguistics. All aspects of the field are explored, from the various types of electronic corpora that are available to instructions on how to design and compile a corpus. Graeme Kennedy surveys the development of corpora for use in linguistic research, looking back to the pre-electronic age as well as to the massive growth of computer corpora in the electronic age.

Provides an overview of a dynamic and rapidly growing area with a widely applied methodology. This handbook covers the historical development of the field and its growing influence and application in other areas. It is suitable for advanced undergraduates and postgraduates.

This handbook is a comprehensive practical resource on corpus linguistics. It features a range of basic and advanced approaches, methods and techniques in corpus linguistics, from corpus compilation principles to quantitative data analyses. The Handbook is organized in six Parts. Parts I to III feature chapters that discuss key issues and the know-how related to various topics around corpus design, methods and corpus types. Parts IV-V aim to offer a user-friendly introduction to the quantitative analysis of corpus data: for each statistical technique discussed, chapters provide a practical guide with R and come with supplementary online material. Part VI focuses on how to write a corpus linguistic paper and how to meta-analyze corpus linguistic research. The volume can serve as a course book as well as for individual study. It will be an essential reading for students of corpus linguistics as well as experienced researchers who want to expand their knowledge of the field.

This collection sheds light on the ways in which corpus linguistics and the use of learner corpora might be applied to the study of academic discourse, revealing linguistic and rhetorical patterns and insights into variation across a range of disciplinary genres. Organized into three sections, the book highlights key tools and methodologies in corpus analysis to study such features as discourse markers, lexical bundles, linguistic complexity, lexico-grammatical conventions, and modality in case studies in studies of academic discourse, both in a second language and in English for specific purposes. The volume features examples from disciplinary genres not often covered in the existing literature, including MA theses, academic book reviews, and online student forums. Taken together with the study of learner corpora, the book demonstrates the impact of corpus linguistic tools in better understanding linguistic patterns of specific languages and language use and in turn, their role in helping to identify the needs of language learners. The book will be of interest to students and scholars in corpus linguistics, applied linguistics, and English for Specific Purposes.

From being the occupation of a marginal (and frequently marginalised) group of researchers, the linguistic analysis of machine-readable language corpora has moved to the mainstream of research on the English language. In this process an impressive body of results has accumulated which, over and above the intrinsic descriptive interest it holds for students of the English language, forces a major and systematic re-thinking of foundational issues in linguistic theory. Corpus linguistics and linguistic theory was accordingly chosen as the motto for the twentieth annual gathering of ICAME, the International Computer Archive of Modern/ Medieval English, which was hosted by the University of Freiburg (Germany) in 1999. The present volume, which presents selected papers from this conference, thus builds on previous successful work in the computer-aided description of English and at the same time represents an attempt at stock-taking and methodological reflection in a linguistic subdiscipline that has clearly come of age. Contributions cover all levels of linguistic description - from phonology/ prosody, through grammar and semantics to discourse-analytical issues such as genre or gender-specific linguistic usage. They are united by a desire to further the dialogue between the corpus-linguistic community and researchers working in other traditions. Thereby, the atmosphere ranges from undisguised skepticism (as expressed by Noam Chomsky in an interview which is part of the opening contribution by Bas Aarts) to empirically substantiated optimism (as, for example, in Bernadette Vine's significantly titled contribution Getting things done).

This alphabetic guide provides definitions and discussion of key terms used in corpus linguistics. Corpus data is being used in a growing number of English and Linguistics departments which have no record of past research with corpus data. This is the first comprehensive glossary of the many specialist terms in corpus linguistics and will be useful for corpus linguists and non corpus linguists alike. Clearly written, by a team of experienced academics in the field, the glossary provides full coverage of both traditional and contemporary terminology.

This book presents the reader with a set of diverse, carefully developed and clearly specified systems of transcription and coding, arising from contrasting theoretical perspectives, and presented as alternative choices, situated within the theoretical domain most natural to each. The perspectives represented include first and second language acquisition, interethnic and crosscultural interaction, information structure, and the study of discourse influences on linguistic expression. In the contributed chapters, the designers of these systems provide a distillation of collective experiences from the past quarter century, telling in their own words their perspectives on language processes, how these perspectives have shaped their choice of methodology in transcription and coding of natural language, and describing their systems in detail. Overview chapters by the editors then provide design principles and guidelines concerning issues pertinent to all systems, including such things as reliability, validity, ease of learning, computational tractability, and robustness against error. The final chapter is a compendium of existing computerized archives of language data and information sources together with details concerning data access and use.