Wikipedia
Corpus linguistics is the study of language as expressed in samples ''(corpus corpora)'' or "real world" text. The approach runs counter to Noam Chomsky's view that real language is riddled with performance-related errors, thus requiring careful analysis of small speech samples obtained in a highly controlled laboratory setting. Corpus linguistics does away with Chomsky's ''competence/performance'' split; adherents believe that reliable language analysis best occurs on field-collected samples, in natural contexts and with minimal experimental interference.In some areas there is an overlap with computational linguistics, as the latter moves towards Natural language processing language processing applications. This means dealing with real input data, where descriptions based on a linguist's intuition are not usually helpful.A landmark in modern corpus linguistics was the publication by Henry Kucera and Nelson Francis of ''Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English'' in 1967, a work based on the analysis of the Brown Corpus, a carefully compiled selection of current American English, totalling about a million words drawn from a wide variety of sources. Kucera and Francis subjected it to a variety of computational analyses, from which they compiled a rich and variegated opus, combining elements of linguistics, language teaching, psychology, statistics, and sociology. Shortly thereafter Boston publisher Houghton-Mifflin approached Kucera to supply a million word, three-line citation base for its new The American Heritage Dictionary of the English LanguageAmerican Heritage Dictionary, the first dictionary to be compiled using corpus linguistics. The AHD made the innovative step of combining ''prescriptive'' elements (how language ''should'' be used) with ''descriptive'' information (how it actually ''is'' used).Other publishers followed suit. The British publisher Collins' COBUILD dictionarydictionaries, designed for users learning English as a foreign language, were compiled using the Bank of English.The Brown Corpus has also spawned a number of similarly structured corpora: the LOB Corpus (1960s British English), Kolhapur (Indian English), Wellington (New Zealand English), ACE (australian English), the Frown Corpus (early 1990s American English), and the FLOB Corpus (1990s British English). Other corpora represent many languages, varieties and modes, and include The British National Corpus, a 100 million word collection of a range of spoken and written texts, created in the 1990s by a consortium of publishers, universities (Oxford UniversityOxford and Lancaster UniversityLancaster) and the British Library. There is a project underway to create an American National Corpus.
See further - concordance (KWIC) collocation keyword lexical profile machine translation semantic prosody text corpus translation memory
External links - ling.lancs.ac.uk - McEnery and Wilson's Corpus Linguistics Page rdues.uce.ac.uk - Research and Development Unit for English Studies corpus.bham.ac.uk - The Centre for Corpus Linguistics at Birmingham University specgram.com - A Corpus-Linguistic Approach to Demography: an example of corpus linguistics gone awry.Category:Discourse analysisCategory:Corpus linguistics*de:Korpuslinguistikes:Corpus !lingüísticoja:コーパス 語学pt:Corpus? !lingüísticoru:Корпусн ая? !лингвистикаsimple:W ikipedia:Concordancing?
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Websites
WordSmith Tools
software for lexical analysis
http://www.lexically.net/wordsmith
English Study Direct
EFL, ESL, ELT, TESOL, EAP resources including journals, tests, e-learning & courses e.g. IELTS, TOEFL academic writing
http://www.englishstudydirect.com/
Costas Gabrielatos
Personal website with articles, materials and links relevant to linguistics (applied or otherise), English language teaching (ELT/TESOL), and Language Teacher Education.
http://www.gabrielatos.com/
Department of Linguistics and Modern English Language
Details of courses, research projects, and related news, as well as information for both undergraduates and postgraduates.
http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk
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