UBLI has conducted field surveys since 2002 and built spoken language corpora for French, Spanish, Italian (Salentino dialect), Russian, Malaysian, Turkish, Japanese, and Canadian multilinguals. This volume features new research presented at the UBLI second workshop on Corpus Linguistics – Research Domain, which was held on September 14, 2006. The first part consisting of eleven presentations to this workshop shows a wide range of subjects within the area of corpus-based research, such as dictionary, linguistic atlas, dialect, translation, ancient texts, non-standard texts, sociolinguistics, second language acquisition, and natural language processing. The second part of this volume comprises ten additional contributions to both written and spoken corpora by the members and research assistants of UBLI.

This book presents a collection of original research articles that showcase the state of the art of research in corpus and computational linguistic approaches to Chinese language teaching, learning and assessment. It offers a comprehensive set of corpus resources and natural language processing tools that are useful for teaching, learning and assessing Chinese as a second or foreign language; methods for implementing such resources and techniques in Chinese pedagogy and assessment; as well as research findings on the effectiveness of using such resources and techniques in various aspects of Chinese pedagogy and assessment.

This volume comprises nine contributions that were written by up-and-coming corpus-based researchers with varied areas of expertise, who were all disciples of Douglas Biber sometime in the past two decades. These papers cover a wide variety of linguistic analyses and describe the principles of the Flagstaff school: a careful procedure for language corpora collection with special consideration for corpus size, representativeness, sampling and systematic analysis; the use of computer programming abilities that allow the posing of corpus-based research questions never asked before; and a strong emphasis on the combination of quantitative methods based on sound and innovative statistical procedures complemented with comprehensive qualitative functional analyses of the language. This volume has been edited in honor of Douglas Biber, a pioneer of the American school of corpus-based research.

Contrastive studies have experienced a dramatic revival in the last decades. By combining the methodological advantages of computer corpus linguistics and the possibility of contrasting texts in two or more languages, the structure and use of languages can be explored with greater accuracy, detail and empirical strength than before. The approach has also proved to have fruitful practical applications in a number of areas such as language teaching, lexicography, translation studies and computer-aided translation. This volume contains twelve studies comparing linguistic phenomena in English and seven other languages. The topics range from comparisons of specific lexical categories and word combinations to syntactic constructions and discourse phenomena such as cohesion and thematic structure. The studies highlight similarities and differences in the use, semantics and functions of the compared items, as well as the emergence of new meanings and language change. The emphasis varies from purely linguistic studies to those focusing on practical applications.

In the past few decades the use of increasingly large text corpora has grown rapidly in language and linguistics research. This was enabled by remarkable strides in natural language processing (NLP) technology, technology that enables computers to automatically and efficiently process, annotate and analyze large amounts of spoken and written text in linguistically and/or pragmatically meaningful ways. It has become more desirable than ever before for language and linguistics researchers who use corpora in their research to gain an adequate understanding of the relevant NLP technology to take full advantage of its capabilities. This volume provides language and linguistics researchers with an accessible introduction to the state-of-the-art NLP technology that facilitates automatic annotation and analysis of large text corpora at both shallow and deep linguistic levels. The book covers a wide range of computational tools for lexical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and discourse analysis, together with detailed instructions on how to obtain, install and use each tool in different operating systems and platforms. The book illustrates how NLP technology has been applied in recent corpus-based language studies and suggests effective ways to better integrate such technology in future corpus linguistics research. This book provides language and linguistics researchers with a valuable reference for corpus annotation and analysis.