"Investigating Real Language" is a seminar for all those who want to get some hands-on experience
with natural language data. Our aim is to leave behind the rules and regulations of prescriptive
grammar and to investigate how English is used in everyday real-life communication. This course
offers an introduction to different varieties of English, different methods of empirical data
collection (such as questionnaires and interviews), and the different linguistic corpora available at
our university. No special technical or corpus-linguistic knowledge required. Background reading:
Jonathan Culpeper et al. (eds.). 2009. English Language: Description, Variation and Context.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. (p. 335ff) Douglas Biber, Susan Conrad and Randi Reppen. 1998. Corpus Linguistics: Investigating
Language Structure and Use. Cambridge University Press. |
