Welcome all of you !
In this blog I want to introduce you to the world of Corpora which can serve as a really helpful tool when it comes to research in linguistics.
So what exactly is Corpora? Firstly, corpus is the singular form of the word corpora which is the plural form. Corpus comes from the word ‘body’ in Latin. ( I know, what a fun fact) So, “a corpus typically implies a finite body of text, sampled to be maximally representative of a particular variety of language, and which can be stored and manipulated using a computer” (McEnery and Wilson, 1996: 59) in other words, a corpus is a collection of authentic texts used for the purpose of research.
To understand what is Corpus Lingusistics I used a video that helped me to understand the concept of this topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32RjJ-lA-8Q
To measure the usefulness of corpora in my module i used Antconc. It is an open source corpus analysis to look for concordance in numerous texts. Firstly, I selected twelve files and I opened them in the software. When I had the corpus loaded, I just started searching for things that I wanted to look for. I searched for the word ‘together’ (random, I know). The display showed me all the hits for my chosen word and I ended up having 35 hits. Keep in mind, I had never done anything so related with technology so i was playing around with looking for very random words for a long while…
One of the main features of Antconc, is that you can sort the results. Once i hit the button ‘sort’ the center word still stayed in the center and then i had the next word highlighted and then the second word highlighted and the third word highlighted, all in three different colors.
An advantage of this tool used by corpus linguistics is that it offers many functions, you can work with a multitude of corpora, offers multi-language support for research and is suitable for beginner users with basic computer experience (me) Also it promotes interactive learning for a student and teaching for a teacher when it comes to second language acquisition as it expands vocabulary and provides meanings.
From my research, knowledge of Corpora may be enriching in the future as technology is moving forward… “Current trends in corpus linguistics research suggest that future studies will rely
increasingly on large corpora, advanced functionality, and sophisticated statistical
methods” (Reference: Laurence Anthony, Linguistic Research 30(2), 141-161 https://www.laurenceanthony.net/research/20130827_linguistic_research_paper/linguistic_research_paper_final.pdf)
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