Corpus Linguistics

• Provide negative evidence

• Explain why

• Provide all possible language at a time

Corpus limitations (3)

• Frequency of words/phrases

• Differences between spoken and written English

• Common grammatical structures and collocations

• Usage of modal verbs, idioms, and formal/informal language

• Vocabulary size needed for conversation

Questions Corpus Linguistics can answer

Frequency

counts how often a word or phrase appears in a corpus

Concordance

Shows every occurrence of a word/phrase with its surrounding words (context)

Collocation

identifies words that frequently occur together with a target word

• Comparison

• Focus on the top most frequent words

• Calculate a number of other types of phenomena

Approaches in Frequency Methods (3)

Type-token ration

• measure of the amount of lexical repetition within a text

Lexical richness

expresses the number of unique lexical adjectives in a corpus

• Mutual Information (MI) Score

• Dice coefficient

Approaches in Collocation Methods (2)

Mutual Information Score

a method of calculating collocation based on the strength of a relationship beteen two words

Dice coefficient

Generally reveals more frequent lexical collocates

Dispersion

Distribution of keywords in a corpus

low type-token ratio

high lexical repetition

high type-token ratio

wider range of vocabulary

Lexical richness

• number of hapaxes (words that occur only once in a text) as a percentage of the whole text

• helpful in building a general profile of a particular text or corpus

Concordance

• Table of all of the occurrences of a linguistic item in a corpus, presented within their linguistic contexts

• Allows qualitative analyses to be carried out on corpus data, letting the researcher explore individual cases in detail

Collocation

demonstrating (relatively) exclusive or frequent relationships between words (or other linguistic phenomena)

Mutual Information (MI) Score

Takes into account the relative positions of two words across a whole corpus

• If they usually occur close together and rarely occur apart then they will receive a high score

• If they often occur together, but equally often occur apart, then their score will be lower

Dice coefficient

Identifying the collocates around a word gives us an indication about subtle meanings and connotations that a word possesses, which are rarely explained in dictionaries