Learning Summary 3

Corpus linguistics 

Corpus

⭐ is a collection of machine-readable, authentic texts, chosen to characterize or represent a state or variety of a language.

Corpus Linguistic

⭐ defined as…a collection of naturally-occurring texts in a computer- readable format which can be retrieved and analyzed using corpus analysis software.

Corpus

👉 Word frequency lists                                                           These can be used to analyse the vocabulary contained in a text or corpus.                                

👉 Concordancing

👉 Collocation

Designing corpus 

Size📌

•     There are no fixed rules; depending on research purposes.

Text extracts vs. full texts📌

•     Depends on the aim of corpus compilation.

               Whole text offers more coverage because words or terms to be looked at may be randomly distributed throughout the text.

                Specific sections may be helpful if we are looking for words or phrases under particular content areas or want to create purposeful sub-corpora.

Number of texts📌

• Choices can be made between                                               ➰few texts of large size                                                                ➰number of texts with smaller sizes
• Depends on research focus.

Medium📌

• Can be spoken or written texts or mixed.
• Depends on research questions.

Subject and text type📌

• Should mainly focus on the specialized text under investigation.
• Texts may come from different subjects if the research focus is on the study of particula language features rather than term extraction.