Corpus Linguistics in Research Doctorate in Education University of Warwick 6th November 2008

Aims Understanding key terms Understanding relation to research paradigms Consideration of usefulness to own context Practice in hands-on use of a corpus tool

Key Terms Corpus Linguistics Corpus and corpora Lemma Concordance

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 time Useful 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 Wordlist Which 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)