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The use of corpora, i.e. collections of spoken or written texts, is gaining more and more grounds in linguistics since it is widely accepted that language can best be studied in natural, authentic contexts. The aim of this class is two-fold: first, general matters relating to the use of electronic corpora will be discussed to present the merits but also the limits of this method. Second, we will use corpora to study selected phenomena of the English language in order to enable students to perform searches on their own. The general issues to be dealt with include e.g. the motivation for using naturally occurring data, the texts that are used, annotations and the different corpora there are of the English language. The linguistic phenomena to be dealt with are open to discussion and will be adapted to the participants’ particular interests; we could for example compare grammar-related issues across different varieties of English. We will focus on corpora that are accessible online, such as the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English. |
