Methodology: Corpus linguistics

This course is intended to introduce students to the theoretical and practical aspects of working with electronic language corpora. We will be looking at a range of standard reference corpora (e.g. the British National Corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English) and use a number of (web-based and offline/local) tools to retrieve and analyse corpus data. Depending on student preferences, there will also be an opportunity to familiarise yourself with a selection of specialised corpora (e.g. historical/diachronic corpora such as the Helsinki Corpus or spoken corpora such as the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English). Towards the end of the course, we will then be looking at (automated) ways to compile your own corpora from data available on the Internet.

In addition to the general principles of corpus linguistics, at least the following topics will be discussed:

• (basic) statistical analyses of corpus results
• collocations and semantic prosodies
• manual annotation (and analysis) of corpus results
• visualisation of corpus results

This 5-credit course will be taught in an intensive format during two weeks in September (Monday 5th to Wednesday 8th) and October (Wednesday 19th to Friday 21st), with classes taking place daily and in slots of 4 hours each.