Corpus Linguistics and Lexicography

2010

Corpus Pragmatics

Contemporaneously with the advances of technology as well as the advent of computers in language studies, we have witnessed a boom in the emergence of new books in Corpus Linguistics (see for example Dash & Ramamoorthy 2019; Paquot & Gries, 2020; Seoane & Biber, 2021). From among the informative books in this fast growing field of knowledge is the current one authored by Barth and Schnell in 2022. This work of scholarship has been organized in 11 chapters, which provide readers with state-of-the-art concepts of theory and practice for conducting research in the domain of Corpus Linguistics. The first two chapters function as an introduction in which the authors, succinctly, shed some light on the basic concept of corpus, its divergence from other approaches as well as its convergence with other usage-oriented fields within linguistics such as Sociolinguistics, Linguistics Typology and Language Change. The authors provide the reader with a definition of corpus and Corpus Linguistics, words, lexeme, type and token as well as some basic statistical concepts such as mode, mean and median. Later on, the authors make a distinction between structural context, syntagmatic context and constructional context in order to delineate the role of context in corpora. There are different types of corpora with specific composition criteria, which need to be delineated for the readers. In this regard, Chapter three, which is thematically divided into two parts, is a detailed description of the corpus composition criteria and typology. In the first part, the authors enumerate such concepts as size, balance, representativeness as well as authenticity and spontaneity as the core criteria for compiling a corpus. Furthermore, a subtle distinction is made between raw, primary

System, 2022

As a cutting-edge and rapidly developing area in modern language research and teaching, corpus linguistics (CL) can support the English for Academic Purposes (EAP) community by equipping researchers, practitioners and students with the knowledge of academic language. The timely book Corpus Linguistics for English for Academic Purposes, by Vander Viana and Aisling O'Boyle, investigates the CL-EAP interface and provides a detailed discussion of the key concepts, practices and research applications of CL which are relevant to the EAP community. As corpus linguists and academic English writers, we found the book informative since we had realized the merits of applying CL as methods/resources to language teaching and learning, while a dearth of volumes has specifically looked into the ways to go about using CL for EAP. Accordingly, this book fills the gap in the current knowledge regarding this interface and is thus expected to contribute to the ever-expanding areas of CL and EAP. The book consists of ten chapters. To give readers a clear picture of the book, we assume it could be divided into two large parts except for the last concluding chapter. The first six chapters provide a comprehensive and reader-friendly basis for novices in the field of EAP (Ch. 1-2), CL and the CL-EAP interface (Ch. 3-6). These chapters take up about half of the volume. The next three chapters (Ch. 7-9), from our perspective, constitute the fascinating part and the essence of this book, where the authors introduce corpus studies on spoken, written, and computer-mediated academic discourse (CMAD) respectively. To be more specific, in the first part (Ch. 1-6), the first two chapters concern the topic under investigation, i.e., EAP. Referring to key pieces of seminal works, the authors introduce how EAP which was once a branch of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) has since grown into a full-fledged discipline on its own, and point out that CL is one of the five important approaches to EAP. Chapters 3 and 4 describe the interface between the two fields of CL and EAP. It is noteworthy that the authors present a number of EAP corpora which are freely available in Section 3.4, including those in American English, British English and English as Lingua Franca. In Chapter 3, the authors also pay particular attention to the Corpus of Journal Articles (CJA) 2014, and provide a case study on the synonyms of the sequence, "this article" (p. 41), which serves to give the reader a first impression about a practical corpus-based EAP study. Chapter 5 touches upon corpus compilation. Considering that compiling a large-scale balanced corpus is too time-consuming and costly, general linguists adopting corpus-based approach usually do not compile a corpus themselves, yet it is feasible to do so for the EAP research. Various aspects on corpus compilation are discussed, including 25 potential criteria in the process, sampling, balance, size, ethical matters, and so on. The role of Chapter 6 is twofold. On the one hand, it serves as an introduction to some basic concepts put forward by the traditional corpus linguistic approach (also known as the Neo-Firthian or Birmingham school), such as concordance, collocation, and the like. On the other hand, it can be seen as a user manual of the corpus software, AntConc, for beginners. However, one point worth noting is that the latest version of AntConc seems to have undergone a significant change with the underlying codes completely rewritten. One consequence is that it does not support the standard .xml format of corpora introduced in the book any more. Thus, readers might find it hard to consult the book if they attempt to use the Manuscript (without Author Details) Click here to view linked References

Stubbs (2006), in his state of the art overview, draws attention to the frequent reticence or vagueness of corpus analysts in discussing their operational methods within a scientific context, (a context addressed in detail in Partington (forthcoming)). This lack of clarity in discussing the methodological framework employed is, perhaps, most surprising given the way in which corpus linguistics situates itself within a scientific frame, and lays such claims to a scientific nature. This brief paper, then, addresses the question posed in its title, namely, “What is Corpus Linguistics?” – is it a discipline, a methodology, a paradigm or none or all of these? - but does not attempt to offer any definitive answers. Rather, the aim is to present the reader with a number of observations on how corpus linguistics has been construed in its own literature and then to leave the question open, in the hope of stimulating further discussion.

Corpus linguistics around the world, 2006

Corpus linguistics has revolutionised our way of working in historical linguistics. The painstaking job of collecting data and manually analysing them has been made less arduous with the introduction of the machine processing of corpora, which allows for quick and efficient searches. The aim of the present study is two-fold: to show how corpus linguistics has contributed to the ways in which researchers approach the study of the history of English, and to provide an overview of selected corpora available in the field. Setting aside the theoretical debate as to whether corpus linguistics should be considered merely a methodology, a branch of linguistics, or both (Taylor, 2008), it is widely acknowledged that corpus linguistics is of considerable help in any branch of linguistics, be it theoretical or applied. The use of corpora makes it possible to test hypotheses established within a specific linguistic area through the fast and reliable analysis of vast pools of material. As a result, the objective measurement of data is available to scholars, who can thus verify their hypotheses and intuitions, and can quickly amend or qualify their research claims if previous ones are seen to be falsifiable. There is, then, a continuous interaction within theory, as expressed in linguistic postulates, concepts and hypotheses, and an application and validation of these theoretical principles through the use of linguistic corpus analysis. The use of corpora is perhaps a more powerful instrument in the field of historical linguistics than in other fields, since the absence of living informants here makes judgements based on intuitions unreliable, and claims have to be empirically attested using data. This data can be extracted from systematically compiled collections of machine-readable texts, called corpora. However, in considering these undeniably advantageous working tools, some caveats should be borne in mind, as will be discussed in what follows.

2001

The appearance of not one but two introductions to corpus linguistics within the same series shows the maturation and diversification of this fledgling subdiscipline within linguistics. McEnery and Wilson offer an overview or annotated report on work done within the computer-corpus research paradigm, including computational linguistics, whereas Barnbrook offers a guide or manual on the procedures and methodology of corpus linguistics, particularly with regard to machine-readable texts in English and to the type of results thereby generated.

English for Specific Purposes, 1994