1. Corpus Linguistics

2. What is corpus linguistics? Method / Theory in Linguistics Analysis of collections of texts (corpora) Verifying/ Strengthening or weakening of hypotheses through statistics -> quantitative textual analysis

3. A little history 1897: Käding analyzed „manually“ a corpus of 11 million words 1967er: Henry Cucera and Nelson Francis analyzed the Brown Corpus of American English (computer-assisted) 1970-90: The number of computer-assisted linguistic analyses was doubled / 5yrs E.g. 2007, latest update of the BNC = 100-million-word corpus

4. …Corpus Analysis? Tools and concordance programs (e.g. Wordsmith, Zaira) Concordance: a word in ist immediate co- text Different types of corpora: general (e.g. BNC), specific (some criteria: topic, genre, author…)

6. Who uses it and where? Compilation of dictionaries Linguistist, Language teachers, etc. ->Descriptions of language and it‘s variations (e.g. sociolects, dialects…) Discourse Analysis, i.e. linguistic phenomena in various discourse types (z.B. news papers, novels,etc.)

7. Corpus Analysis and CDA Approach -> Language does not reflect reality – we construct reality through language Langauge plays an important role in the construction and maintainance of ideologies  it neutralizes and naturalizes inequalities of power and money Corpus Analysis is used as a method to discover certain societal patterns and ideologies (within this approach)

8. Wordsmith is a collection of corpus linguistics tools for looking for patterns in a language/discourse/texts(s).corpus linguistics Mike Scott, University of Liverpool, www.lexically.net Wordlist: orders words in a corpus alphabetically, according to frequency and other statistical information Concord: concordances, collocates Keywords: compares the frequency of words within two corpora