122224 SE Linguistics Seminar / BA Paper (2019W)

122224-1 SE Linguistics Seminar / BA Paper (2019W)
Corpus Linguistics

Although Corpus Linguistics has become the dominant approach or methodology among European anglicists undertaking linguistic research, its fundamental foundations are often taken for granted and not adequately understood.

At the centre of the approach is ‘the corpus’, but what really is a corpus? What is good corpus design? What choice is out there? And how important is a corpus and its design?

Given a corpus, how can it be exploited with a view to helping with the description of English or some aspect or understanding of the use of English ?

The great benefit of electronic text analysis is the production of frequency information. When linguistic data become numbers, what do the numbers tell us, and how might that insight be conferred back on the original data? (That said, we will not be turning this seminar into a statistics seminar!)

Our main goal will be to identify and review the main principles of a corpus linguistics approach.

A second aim will be look at exemplary studies of a corpus linguistics approach being used in action, across different structural levels of English.

The first few weeks will be devoted to presentations and discussions on the basics of corpus design and structure and on ways of using a corpus fir the extraction of examples.

The weeks leading up to Christmas will be devoted to exemplary studies of a lexical, morpho-syntactic or discourse-pragmatic kind.

By then, students will have chosen an assignment topic, from a small choice, and in the classes in January will make a class presentations, intended to reveal their understanding of ‘the corpus’ and ‘a corpus linguistics approach’ as applied to their choice of data and topic, each to be agreed in advance with the seminar tutor.

This course promises to be an intense, exciting, dynamic, precise, practical course. It is undoubtedly a course for anyone interested in describing English in any of its periods, world territories, or genres/registers, and any of its structural features (especially lexical, morphological, syntactical, discoursal and pragmatic plus any combination thereof) as well as aspects of change or variation therein, and seeking a powerful methodology for doing so.

This course will requires each student to bring to class their own laptop. We will each need a laptop to work as a group in unison on particular topics or for downloading corpora and/or software.

There will be regular exercises and class presentations.