Edinburgh Textbooks in Empirical Linguistics
Corpus Linguistics has quickly established itself as the leading undergraduate course book in the subject. This second edition takes full account of the latest developments in the rapidly changing field, making this the most up-to-date and comprehensive textbook available. It gives a step-by-step introduction to what a corpus is, how corpora are constructed, and what can be done with them. Each chapter ends with a section of study questions that contain practical corpus-based exercises.
- Designed for student use, with all technical terms explained in the text and referenced further in a Glossary
- Examples are taken from existing corpora; detailed case study chapter included
- Contains end-of-chapter summaries, study questions and suggestions for further reading
- Updated reviews of new studies, areas that have recently come to prominence and new directions in corpus encoding and annotation standards
- Detailed coverage of multilingual corpus construction and use
- An in-depth historical review of computer-based corpora from the 1940s to the present day
- Helpful appendices include answers to the study questions, up-to-date information on where corpora can be found, and the latest software for corpus research.
"[An] important addition to the fast growing literature in corpus linguistics… should be read by anyone interested in utilization of large-scale corpora in linguistic research."
Studies in the Linguistic Sciences, on the first edition.
"The ability to program a computer has become increasingly important in work that involves corpora. Specialised research needs can no longer be met by available software, and purchasing customised programs is usually not an option. This book enables the researcher to write programs for text and corpus processing. Useful techniques are illustrated with the popular programming language Java, which is very well suited for handling textual data, and at the same time easy to learn.
Key Features
- a general introduction to programming for readers with a linguistic background
- a practical introduction to corpus linguistics for readers with a programming background who are new to corpus processing
- a guide to relevant aspects of Java which will be useful for text processing
- a variety of sample programs which are in themselves useful tools for corpus research.
This textbook is designed to provide a detailed understanding of the principles and practices underlying the use of large language corpora in exploratory learning and English language teaching and research. It focuses on the largest and most representative corpus of spoken and written data yet compiled - the British National Corpus - and on the search tool SARA (SGML Aware Retrieval Application). The method adopted is to provide a graded series of exercises, each introducing at the same time new features of the software and new techniques or applications for computer-assisted language learning. The book also includes an overview of previous work in corpus linguistics, a bibliography, and a reference manual for the SARA software.* Graded self-paced tutorials* Suggestions for further work* Thorough coverage of corpus linguistics theories and practices* State-of-the-art software* Accessible non-specialist style
This book introduces the reader to the changing notions of the lexicon and dictionary-making, using a convergence of perspectives from computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, and computational lexicography/lexicology. The main issues include: the relation between lexicon and corpus; corpus-based lexical modelling of language; the computational storage of the lexicon. From this, the book constructs and applies a framework for lexicon-building to a case study. It also stresses the importance of the Internet and World Wide Web for dictionary research and study.
This book in the Edinburgh Textbooks in Empirical Linguistics series is a comprehensive introduction to the statistics currently used in corpus linguistics. Statistica
l techniques and corpus applications - whether oriented towards linguistics or language engineering - often go hand in glove, and corpus linguists have used an increasingly wide variety of statistics, drawing on techniques developed in a great many fields.This is the first one-volume introduction to the subject.
This book is a first-stop introduction to corpus-based language research. It takes the reader systematically through the practical problems and benefits including the points to be reviewed before using computers, obtaining corpus material, the main analytical tools and the most important applications of computerised natural language processing. Each chapter offers guidance on programming where appropriate at a level suitable for readers with no prior experience, and provides exercises to help the reader to apply the principles covered. Case studies are used to show how the techniques are used in genuine research situations.
- Provides and introduction to computer analysis, techniques, the practical problems involved in using them and their potential benefits
- The guidance on programming provides a basic tool kit for use and devleopment by readers with no previous experience.
- The exercises at the end of each chapter allow readers to test their understanding and to develop an effective approach to their own research problems.
- The case studies demonstrate the use of the techniques described in real research situations.
