This book provides detailed studies in one of the fastest growing areas of linguistics - corpus analysis - and shows how computers can be used to reveal culturally significant patterns of language use.

Corpora are used widely in linguistics, but not always wisely. This book attempts to frame corpus linguistics systematically as a variant of the observational method. The first part introduces the reader to the general methodological discussions surrounding corpus data as well as the practice of doing corpus linguistics, including issues such as the scientific research cycle, research design, extraction of corpus data and statistical evaluation. The second part consists of a number of case studies from the main areas of corpus linguistics (lexical associations, morphology, grammar, text and metaphor), surveying the range of issues studied in corpus linguistics while at the same time showing how they fit into the methodology outlined in the first part.

This collection sheds light on the ways in which corpus linguistics and the use of learner corpora might be applied to the study of academic discourse, revealing linguistic and rhetorical patterns and insights into variation across a range of disciplinary genres. Organized into three sections, the book highlights key tools and methodologies in corpus analysis to study such features as discourse markers, lexical bundles, linguistic complexity, lexico-grammatical conventions, and modality in case studies in studies of academic discourse, both in a second language and in English for specific purposes. The volume features examples from disciplinary genres not often covered in the existing literature, including MA theses, academic book reviews, and online student forums. Taken together with the study of learner corpora, the book demonstrates the impact of corpus linguistic tools in better understanding linguistic patterns of specific languages and language use and in turn, their role in helping to identify the needs of language learners. The book will be of interest to students and scholars in corpus linguistics, applied linguistics, and English for Specific Purposes.

The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics provides a timely overview of a dynamic and rapidly growing area with a widely applied methodology. Through the electronic analysis of large bodies of text, corpus linguistics demonstrates and supports linguistic statements and assumptions. In recent years it has seen an ever-widening application in a variety of fields: computational linguistics, discourse analysis, forensic linguistics, pragmatics and translation studies. Bringing together experts in the key areas of development and change, the handbook is structured around six themes which take the reader through building and designing a corpus to using a corpus to study literature and translation. A comprehensive introduction covers the historical development of the field and its growing influence and application in other areas. Structured around five headings for ease of reference, each contribution includes further reading sections with three to five key texts highlighted and annotated to facilitate further exploration of the topics. The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics is the ideal resource for advanced undergraduates and postgraduates.

A linguistic corpus is a collection of texts which have been selected and brought together so that language can be studied on the computer. Today, corpus linguistics offers some of the most powerful new procedures for the analysis of language, and the impact of this dynamic and expanding sub-discipline is making itself felt in many areas of language study. In this volume, a selection of leading experts in various key areas of corpus construction offer advice in a readable and largely non-technical style to help the reader to ensure that their corpus is well designed and fit for the intended purpose. This guide is aimed at those who are at some stage of building a linguistic corpus. Little or no knowledge of corpus linguistics or computational procedures is assumed, although it is hoped that more advanced users will find the guidelines here useful. It is also aimed at those who are not building a corpus, but who need to know something about the issues involved in the design of corpora in order to choose between available resources and to help draw conclusions from their studies.

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.

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.