An Introduction to Corpus Linguistics Studies in Language and Linguistics Series

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.

Acknowledgements

1. INTRODUCTION
Corpora
The role of computers in corpus linguistics
The scope of corpus linguistics

2. THE DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF CORPORA
Pre-electronic corpora
Types of electronic corpora
Major electronic corpora for linguistic research
Electonic text databases
Issues in corpus design and compilation
Compling a corpus
Organizations and professional associations concerned with corpus design, development and research

3. CORPUS-BASED DESCRIPTIONS OF ENGLISH
Lexical description
Grammatical studies centred on morphemes or words
Grammatical studies centred on the sentence
Pragmatics and spoken discourse
Corpus-based studies of variation in the use of English

4. CORPUS ANALYSIS
Corpus annotation and processing
Procedures used in corpus analysis
Corpus search and retrieval software

5. IMPLICATIONS AND APPLICATIONS OF CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS
Goals of linguistic description and the effect of corpora on methodology
Corpus linguistics and computational linguistics
Corpus-based approaches to language teaching

References
Index

Graeme Kennedy is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington.

• Focuses primarily on corpus-based descriptions of English: lexis, morphology, syntax and variation.
• Includes a wide-ranging overview of the published research of corpus linguists to illustrate the results and potential of distributional analyses of English.
• Ddescribes the methodology and procedures that are generally employed including lemmatization, tagging, parsing and the use of important search and retrieval software to produce word-lists, concordances and other analyses.
• Discusses ways in which the corpus-based analysis of languages may contribute to linguistic theory, the description of languages, computational linguistics and language teaching.
• Will appeal to all involved in the study of language, from English language teachers and students of Linguistics to