Understanding Corpus Linguistics

This textbook introduces the fundamental concepts and methods of corpus linguistics for students approaching this topic for the first time, putting specific emphasis on the enormous linguistic diversity represented by approximately 7,000 human languages and broadening the scope of current concerns in general corpus linguistics.
Including a basic toolkit to help the reader investigate language in different usage contexts, this book:
• Shows the relevance of corpora to a range of linguistic areas from phonology to sociolinguistics and discourse
• Covers recent developments in the application of corpus linguistics to the study of understudied languages and linguistic typology
• Features exercises, short problems, and questions
• Includes examples from real studies in over 15 languages plus multilingual corpora
Providing the necessary corpus linguistics skills to critically evaluate and replicate studies, this book is essential reading for anyone studying corpus linguistics.

Contents

Acknowledgements

1. Introduction

2. Basic concepts in corpus linguistics

3. Corpus composition and corpus types

4. Levels of linguistic representation in corpus-linguistic research

5. Corpus queries

6. Corpus building

7. Corpus annotation

8. Statistical description and analysis

9 Corpora in sociolinguistics

10. Corpus linguistics and language documentation

11. Corpus-based typology

References

Index