A. Ludeling – Corpus Linguistics (2008)

Автор: A. Ludeling
Название книги: Corpus Linguistics (2008)
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Лингвистика
Страницы: 1402
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

This handbook provides an up-to-date survey of corpus linguistics. Spoken, written, or multimodal corpora serve as the basis for quantitative and qualitative research on many questions of linguistic interest. The volume comprises 61 articles by internationally renowned experts. They sketch the history of corpus linguistics and its relationship with neighboring disciplines, show its potential, discuss its problems, and describe various methods of collecting, annotating, and searching corpora, as well as processing corpus data. It is up-to-date and a complete handbook which includes both an overview and detailed discussions. It collects a great number of experts in one and the same volume.

Corpus linguistics today is often understood as being a relatively new approach in linguistics
that has to do with the empirical study of “real life” language use with the help
of computers and electronic corpora. In the first instance, a “corpus” is simply any
collection of written or spoken texts. However, when the term is employed with reference
to modern linguistics, it tends to bear a number of connotations, among them machinereadable
form, sampling and representativeness, finite size, and the idea that a corpus
constitutes a standard reference for the language variety it represents. While linguistics
divides up into many research areas depending on complexes of research questions, corpus
linguistics in essence behaves diametrically: it offers a set of methods that can be
used in the investigation of a large number of different research questions.
For a number of reasons, we think that the time is right for a handbook on this
approach: we now have access to large corpora and rather sophisticated tools to retrieve
data from them. Over the past few decades, corpus linguists have gained a great deal of
experience in dealing with both theoretical and practical problems in their research. In
other words, we are now much wiser about the ways in which legitimate claims can be
made about language use on the basis of corpora. There is also a new focus on empirical
data in theoretical linguistics, with growing interest in the techniques and procedures
practised within the corpus linguistic approach.
Our handbook is intended to sketch the history of corpus linguistics, and describe
various methods of collecting, annotating and searching corpora as well as processing
corpus data. It also reports on a number of case studies that illustrate the wide range of
linguistic research questions discussed within the framework.
In this Introduction, we will survey the main areas covered in the 61 articles included
in the handbook. In the next section, we first give a brief overview of the “roots” of
corpus linguistics and then discuss the role played by corpus linguistics in a number of
central fields of linguistics. Our aim is to highlight the various ways in which techniques
deriving from these fields have contributed to modern corpus linguistics, and vice versa,
the ways in which corpus linguistics has been able to contribute to the advances made
in these fields. In section 3, we look at the kinds of data that corpora can give us and
the kinds of research questions these data can be used for. In section 4, we look into the
issues relevant to corpus design, and in section 5, we turn to the links between corpus
linguistics and computational linguistics. Finally, in section 6, we introduce the structure
of the handbook and the way in which the articles have been grouped under the main
section headings.