Syllabus
Topics
1. Corpora and corpus linguistics, corpus-driven and corpus-based approaches, the British National Corpus
2. Simple queries, viewing and sorting the results, exploring metadata
3. Understanding the results, concordance lines, context. Words and phrases, variation within phrases, wildcards
4. Relative frequency, distribution
5. Collocation, statistical measures, significance
6. Colligation, grammatical patterns, queries using tags and lemmata, CQL
7. Keywords and frequenc lists, sub-corpora, corpus stylistics
8. Spoken English corpora, metadata and transcription
9. Parallel translation corpora, translation correspondence, InterCorp
10. Academic language corpora, distributional phraseology, n-grams, lexical bundles
11. Corpora and teaching English, compiling and querying your own corpus
12.-13. Presentation of students' projects
Annotation
The seminar introduces students to the use of electronic corpora of English. It focuses on corpus linguistics as a methodology: the students will get familiar with the corpora of present-day English available, and learn to formulate corpus queries and interpret the results (e.g. collocations, keywords, sociolinguistic data).