Syllabus:
1. The background: J.Sinclair, neo-Firthian linguistics, units of meaning, the idiom principle and the open choice principle; BNCweb
2. Colligation, pattern grammar, local grammar; the KonText interface
3. Collocation, semantic sequences; LancsBox
4. From collocation to semantic preference and discourse prosody
5. Corpus linguistics and phraseology - n-grams, lexical bundles
6. Variation: keyness, keywords, frequency lists
7. Variation: written and spoken English (Spoken BNC2014)
8. Contrastive corpus linguistics, comparable and parallel corpora, InterCorp
9. -
11. Corpus linguistic approaches to discourse analysis, pragmatics, corpus stylistics, learner corpus research (topics to be specified based on the students’ field of study and interest)
12. Students’ presentations
13. Students’ presentations
The course presents corpus linguistics primarily as a method rather than as a discipline, focussing on various ‘corpus-informed’ approaches in English and contrastive linguistics. The seminars combine an introduction to the key concepts and theoretical issues of corpus linguistics with hands-on experience working with corpora of English and, partly, Czech.