120015 AR Linguistics course (interactive) 223/224 (2010S)

The importance of and interest in text corpora as the basis of empirical linguistic research has increased considerably during the last two decades. Consequently, a rise in both the number and types of corpora could be observed. Not only do we have access to corpora covering all periods of the English language today but also more specialized corpora focusing, for instance, on learner English or English as a lingua franca have been developed. This course will first give a general introduction to corpus linguistics, addressing both its advantages and disadvantages, and will then move on to provide students with hands-on experience in conducting empirical research with the help of corpora. We will acquaint ourselves with corpus software and electronic corpora of literary and non-literary texts from the Old English to the Present Day English periods, which together with further reading in more specialised areas will form the basis of students' research projects.