1. Using Corpora in Linguistics
Introduction to WordSmith Tools for Beginners
Íde O’Sullivan
Regional Writing Centre

2. Regional Writing Centre
Corpus Linguistics
McEnery and Wilson (2001:1) describe corpus linguistics as “the study of language based on examples of ‘real life’ language use”.
McEnery, T. and Wilson, A. (2001) (2nd edition) Corpus Linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Regional Writing Centre

3. Regional Writing Centre
Corpus: Definition
“A corpus is [the name given to] a set of texts which has been put together for some purpose, usually (though not necessarily), in computer-readable form” (Wray, Trott & Bloomer, 1990:213).
Wray, T., Trott, K. & Bloomer, A. (1998) Projects in Linguistics: A Practical Guide to Researching Language. London, New York: Arnold.
Regional Writing Centre

4. Regional Writing Centre
Corpus: Definition
“a corpus typically implies a finite body of text, sampled to be maximally representative of a particular variety of a language, and which can be stored and manipulated using a computer” McEnery and Wilson (2001:73).
Corpus ≠ Archive
Regional Writing Centre

5. Concordancing: Definition
“A concordance, in its simplest form, is an alphabetical listing of the words in a text, given together with the contexts in which they appear”.
Catherine Ball, Concordances & Corpora: Tutorial:
Regional Writing Centre

6. Concordancing: Definition
“A concordance is a list of examples of a particular word, part of a word or combination of words, in its contexts drawn from a text corpus. The search word is sometimes also referred to as a keyword. The most common way of displaying a concordance is by a series of lines h the keyword in context (KWIC)”.
Kettemann, B. (1995) “Concordancing in stylistics teaching”, in Grosser, W., Hogg, J. and Hubmeyer, K. (eds), Style: Literary and Non-Literary. Contemporary Trends in Cultural Stylistics. New York: The Edwin Mellen Press:
Regional Writing Centre

7. Regional Writing Centre

8. Software to Analyse Corpora
“Concordancing software enables you to discover patterns that exist in natural language by grouping text in such a way that they are clearly visible […] The real value of the concordancer lies in this question of visibility” (Tribble & Jones, 1997:3).
Tribble, C. and Jones, G. (1997) Concordances in the Classroom: Using Corpora in Language Education. Houston TX: Athelstan.
Regional Writing Centre

9. Regional Writing Centre

10. Using Corpora in Language Learning and Teaching
Organisation of the CD
This CD contains a collection of small genre-specific academic and journalistic corpora in English, French, Gaeilge, German and Spanish.
For each language there are two small genre-specific corpora: a journalistic corpus (100,000 words) and an academic corpus (50,000 words). The journalistic corpora are divided into four subcorpora: current affairs, editorials, reviews and sport. The academic corpora are divided into two subcorpora: theses and articles.
Regional Writing Centre

11. Using Corpora in Language Learning and Teaching
Organisation of the CD
Regional Writing Centre

12. Sources of Journalistic Corpora
English: Irish Examiner
Irish Independent
Irish Times
French: Le Monde
L’Humanité
Gaeilge: Beo
Foinse Lá
German: Die Süddeutsche Zeitung
Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Spanish: La Vanguardia
El Periódico
Regional Writing Centre

13. Sources of Academic Corpora
Articles and thesis written by native speakers
Subject Areas: Literature, Cultural Studies,
Translation Studies, Education,
Applied Linguistics, Sociolinguistics,
Corpus Linguistics, Media Studies,
Language Pedagogy, Teacher Training,
Discourse Analysis, Politics,
Research Methodology,
Second Language Acquisition,
History of Language
Regional Writing Centre

14. Regional Writing Centre
WordSmith Tools
Wordlists
Frequency
Alphabetical order
Statistical information
Keywords
Concord
Collocations
Clusters
Patterns
Plot
Source text
Regional Writing Centre

15. Regional Writing Centre
WordSmith Tools
Concord
Sorting data
Concord expansion option
Concordance with multiple views
Settings
Wildcards
Advanced searching
Close texts
Regional Writing Centre

16. Regional Writing Centre
Worksheet
Run individual wordlists for the Academic Corpus and the Journalistic Corpus. Compare and contrast your findings to reach relative conclusions about each genre.
Run a concordance lists for a chosen aspect of the language:
Do any collocational patterns emerge from this evidence?
What are the most common clusters including the search word(s).
Identify the most common uses of the word.
Are their exceptions to these uses?
Regional Writing Centre

17. Regional Writing Centre
Resources
WordSmith Tools:
MonoConc and ParaConc
Regional Writing Centre

18. Regional Writing Centre
Online Resources
Tim Johns Data-driven Learning Page:
Mike Barlow:
Other resources:
Regional Writing Centre

19. Regional Writing Centre
Online Concordancing
Hong Kong Virtual Language Centre
The Compleat Lexical Tutor (Lextutor)
French Learner Language Oral Corpus (flloc)
Regional Writing Centre

20. Regional Writing Centre
Resources
Freeware Concordancers
ConcApp:
Create your own corpus - Disposable corpus
Issues of copyright
Issue of reliability
Regional Writing Centre

21. Regional Writing Centre
Resources
British National Corpus (corpus demo)
Cobuild Bank of English (wordbanks online)
Corpus Concordance Sampler
Limerick Corpus of Irish-English (L-CIE):
Regional Writing Centre