Corpus Linguistics for Oral History takes a step-by-step approach to presenting how corpus linguistics tools and techniques can be applied to oral history archives. Bridging the gap between the two areas, this book: establishes a framework to pursue this type of research and guides the reader through tasks that will ensure practical application shows how oral narratives can facilitate historical linguistics, including historical sociolinguistics and historical pragmatics illustrates how the techniques of corpus linguistics can help social historians to analyse oral narratives in new and fruitful ways takes readers through each step of the process, from initial close readings of data to constructing a corpus that adheres to parameters of representativeness, through to the application of various corpus linguistics techniques includes an appendix of resources and examples of extracts from a global range of historical texts throughout, introducing the reader to a range of freely accessible, digitized archives This book is key reading for students and researchers working in History and Corpus Linguistics. History students will find a new perspective on approaching primary historical sources, while linguistics students will find insights into an avenue of data worthy of multiple levels of linguistic analysis.

"Corpus Linguistics for Oral History takes a step-by-step approach to presenting how corpus linguistics tools and techniques can be applied to oral history archives"--

Investigating a Corpus of Historical Oral Testimonies guides the reader through the process of sourcing a relevant oral history archive for linguistic analysis, constructing a representative corpus out of this archive and analysing this using corpus tools. Focusing on the oral history archive at the Irish Bureau of Military History, this book shows how corpus linguistics can illuminate themes worthy of investigation that may otherwise remain hidden. This is exemplified through the investigation of how certainty is constructed in this archive through a number of expressions and which serves as a template for both how oral history can aid linguistic understanding and how corpus linguistics can contribute to oral history investigation. Highlighting why oral history archives are worthy of linguistic analysis and showing what readers can gain from blending linguistic tools and competencies with oral history data, this book is essential reading for all researchers and students working in the areas of corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and oral history.

In vielen Bereichen der Linguistik werden Textkorpora, Sprachkorpora oder multimodale Korpora heute als empirische Basis verwendet. Aufbauend auf Methoden des 19. Jahrhunderts haben sich dabei mit dem Aufkommen von elektronischen Korpora seit den 1940ern neue Standards für linguistische Annotation und Vorverarbeitung sowie für qualitative und quantitative Untersuchungen entwickelt. Das Handbuch bietet einen umfassenden Überblick über Geschichte, Methoden und Anwendungen der Korpuslinguistik. Die einzelnen Überblicks- und Spezialartikel sind von Experten und Expertinnen der jeweiligen Gebiete geschrieben. Dabei wird auf klare und umfassende Darstellung, eine gute Vernetzung zwischen den Artikel und weiterführende Hinweise Wert gelegt.

This volume provides an up-to-date survey of the field of corpus linguistics, a field whose methodology has revolutionized much of the empirical work done in most fields of linguistic study over the past decade. Corpus linguistics investigates human language by starting out from large collections of texts - spoken, written, or recorded. These language corpora, which are now regularly available in electronic form, are the basis for quantitative and qualitative research on almost any question of linguistic interest. Many techniques that are in use in corpus linguistics today are rooted in the tradition of the late 18th and 19th century, when linguistics began to make use of mathematical and empirical methods. Modern corpus linguistics has used and developed these methods in close connection with computer science and computational linguistics. The handbook sketches the history of corpus linguistics, shows its potential, discusses its problems, and describes various methods of collecting, annotating, and searching corpora as well as processing corpus data. It also reports case studies that illustrate the wide range of linguistic research questions addressed in corpus linguistics. The over 60 articles included in the handbook are divided into five sections: (1) the origins and history of corpus linguistics and surveys of its relationship to central fields of linguistics (2) corpus compilation (3) corpus types (4) preprocessing of corpora (5) the use and exploitation of corpora. The final section gives an overview of the results of corpus studies obtained in phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, stylometry, dialectology, and discourse analysis. It also reports on recent advances made in human and machine translation, contrastive studies, computer-assisted language learning, and automatic summarization. The contributors to the volume are internationally known experts in their respective fields. The handbook is intended for a wide audience ranging from teachers, university students, and scholars to anyone interested in the use of computers in linguistic analyses and applications.

Explorations in Corpus Linguistics contains selected papers from the eighteenth International Conference on English Language Research on Computerised Corpora (ICAME 18). The papers give a broad overview of the latest activities in corpus linguistics. Issues associated with the creation of corpora are raised, topics ranging from corpus design, to problems of rare data acquisition and data protection, to the relative merits of corpora and free text collections. The main body of the volume is devoted to reports on the analysis of corpora. Several papers offer synchronic descriptions of aspects of modern language usage, in both spoken and written corpora. Some corpora are 'general' in content; those deriving from specialised textual domains include parallel corpora of international varieties of English and of learner language. The diachronic dimension of corpus-based study is also represented, in the examination of some modern-day grammatical features from a historical perspective, and by socio-pragmatic and sociolinguistic studies of diachronic corpus data. The principal aim of English corpus linguistics as reflected here is to describe language in use; there are also cases where such description forms a basis for the development of resources and tools, including specialised taggers, an Internet-based grammar, a glossary, and software to identify semantic relations and diachronic change within corpora.

The C-ORAL-ROM book and DVD provide a unique set of comparable corpora of spontaneous speech for the main Romance languages, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. The corpora are accompanied by comparative linguistic studies, models and standard linguistic measures of spoken language variability. Each corpus is built to the same design using identical sampling techniques, and each corpus is presented in multimedia format, allowing simultaneous access to aligned acoustic and textual information. Texts are headed with information about provenance, participants, etc. and the transcriptions show changes of speaker. Speech acts are tagged according to the evidence of prosodic criteria. Each corpus totals 300,000 words and presents formal and informal speech in a variety of contexts of use, dialogue structure and text genres, semantic domains and speech act typologies. The corpora have great statistical relevance for spoken language structures and can address key issues in human language technology such as speech recognition in unrestricted discourse, the suitability of speech synthesis in natural prosody, and multilingual applications of the spoken language interface. The work provides new data and innovative theoretical perspectives that are relevant for corpus linguistics, romance linguistics, syntactic theory, speech and prosody research, and second language acquisition.