The growth experienced by Corpus Linguistics over the last two decades has complicated the definition of the discipline. There is at present no consensus as to what corpus linguistics exactly is. Is it a methodology, a theoretical framework, a research paradigm? The goal of this book is multi-purpose. It provides material for a discussion of the notion of «corpus linguistics», an overt discussion of the limits of this discipline and a comparison of some of the main approaches. And at the same time it offers a collection of selected papers representative of a range of approaches and applications associated with corpus research.

Marking 30 years of contrastive corpus linguistics, this volume provides a state-of-the-art of the field, charting its development over time and expanding the boundaries of the discipline. Focusing on a diversity of methods and approaches to language comparison, it uses both comparable and translation corpora, and explores a broad range of language registers from newspaper reporting and spoken political discourse to film scripts and football match reports. Using English as the pivot language for each chapter, the volume offers contrastive bilingual and trilingual perspectives on a number of languages, including Czech, Finnish, French, German, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish, covering a typologically diverse field. By exploring the application of complex multi-genre multilingual data sets and expanding the horizons of contrastive studies, it demonstrates how a juxtaposition of cross-linguistic and register variation can deepen our insight into language variation and use. The volume is dedicated to two prominent contrastive corpus linguists: Karin Aijmer and Bengt Altenberg, who have decisively shaped the discipline from its very beginnings. The book opens with a chapter by Aijmer, reflecting on the current breadth and future prospects of research in the area while pointing to emergent trends with an insight that only she can offer.

The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics 2e provides an updated overview of a dynamic and rapidly growing area with a widely applied methodology. Over a decade on from the first edition of the Handbook, this collection of 47 chapters from experts in key areas offers a comprehensive introduction to both the development and use of corpora as well as their ever-evolving applications to other areas, such as digital humanities, sociolinguistics, stylistics, translation studies, materials design, language teaching and teacher development, media discourse, discourse analysis, forensic linguistics, second language acquisition and testing. The new edition updates all core chapters and includes new chapters on corpus linguistics and statistics, digital humanities, translation, phonetics and phonology, second language acquisition, social media and theoretical perspectives. Chapters provide annotated further reading lists and step-by-step guides as well as detailed overviews across a wide range of themes. The Handbook also includes a wealth of case studies that draw on some of the many new corpora and corpus tools that have emerged in the last decade. Organised across four themes, moving from the basic start-up topics such as corpus building and design to analysis, application and reflection, this second edition remains a crucial point of reference for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars in applied linguistics.

The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics (CHECL) surveys the breadth of corpus-based linguistic research on English, including chapters on collocations, phraseology, grammatical variation, historical change, and the description of registers and dialects. The most innovative aspects of the CHECL are its emphasis on critical discussion, its explicit evaluation of the state of the art in each sub-discipline, and the inclusion of empirical case studies. While each chapter includes a broad survey of previous research, the primary focus is on a detailed description of the most important corpus-based studies in this area, with discussion of what those studies found, and why they are important. Each chapter also includes a critical discussion of the corpus-based methods employed for research in this area, as well as an explicit summary of new findings and discoveries.

This textbook introduces the fundamental concepts and methods of corpus linguistics for students approaching this topic for the first time, putting specific emphasis on the enormous linguistic diversity represented by approximately 7,000 human languages and broadening the scope of current concerns in general corpus linguistics. Including a basic toolkit to help the reader investigate language in different usage contexts, this book: Shows the relevance of corpora to a range of linguistic areas from phonology to sociolinguistics and discourse Covers recent developments in the application of corpus linguistics to the study of understudied languages and linguistic typology Features exercises, short problems, and questions Includes examples from real studies in over 15 languages plus multilingual corpora Providing the necessary corpus linguistics skills to critically evaluate and replicate studies, this book is essential reading for anyone studying corpus linguistics.

The standard scientific methodology in linguistics is empirical testing of falsifiable hypotheses. As such the process of hypothesis generation is central, and involves formulation of a research question about a domain of interest and statement of a hypothesis relative to it. In corpus linguistics the domain is text, and generation involves abstraction of data from text, data analysis, and formulation of a hypothesis based on inference from the results. Traditionally this process has been paper-based, but the advent of electronic text has increasingly rendered it obsolete both because the size of digital corpora is now at or beyond the limit of what can efficiently be used in the traditional way, and because the complexity of data abstracted from them can be impenetrable to understanding. Linguists are increasingly turning to mathematical and statistical computational methods for help, and cluster analysis is such a method. It is used across the sciences for hypothesis generation by identification of structure in data which are too large or complex, or both, to be interpretable by direct inspection. This book aims to show how cluster analysis can be used for hypothesis generation in corpus linguistics, thereby contributing to a quantitative empirical methodology for the discipline.

Corpus linguistics has become one of the most widely used methodologies across the different linguistic subdisciplines; especially the study of world-wide varieties of English uses corpus-based investigations as one of the chief methodologies. This volume comprises descriptions of the many new corpus initiatives both within and outside Africa that aim to compile various corpora of African Englishes. Moreover, it contains cutting-edge corpus-based research on African Englishes and the use of corpora in pedagogic contexts within African institutions. This volume thus serves both as a practical introduction to corpus compilation (Part I of the book), corpus-based research (Part II) and the application of corpora in language teaching (Part III), and is intended both for those researchers not yet familiar with corpus linguistics and as a reference work for all international researchers investigating the linguistic properties of African Englishes.

The use of corpora has conventionally been envisioned as being either corpus-based or corpus-driven. While the formal definition of the latter term has been widely accepted since it was established by Tognini-Bonelli (2001), it is often applied to studies that do not, in fact, fullfil the fundamental requirement of a theory-neutral starting point. This volume proposes the term pattern-driven as a more precise alternative. The chapters illustrate a variety of methods that fall under this broad methodology, such as the extraction of lexical bundles, POS-grams and semantic frames, and demonstrate how these approaches can uncover new understandings of both synchronic and diachronic linguistic phenomena.

A comprehensive and accessible introduction to statistics in corpus linguistics, covering multiple techniques of quantitative language analysis and data visualisation.

This book showcases the unique possibilities of corpus linguistic methodologies in engaging with and analysing language data from social media, surveying current approaches, and offering guidelines and best practices for doing language analysis. The book provides an overview of how language in social media has been approached by linguists and non-linguists, before delving into the identification of the datasets requirements needed to pursue investigations in social media, and of the technical aspects of particular platforms that may influence the analysis, such as emoticons, retweets, and metadata. Sample Python code, along with general guidelines for using it, is provided to empower researchers to apply these techniques in their own work, supported by actual examples from three real-life case studies. Di Cristofaro highlights the full potential of using these methodologies in analysing social media language data and the ways in which they might pave the way for future applications of data analysis and processing for corpus linguistics. The book will be key reading for researchers in corpus linguistics and linguists and social scientists interested in data-driven analysis of social media.