Definition and Examples of Corpora in Linguistics
By Richard Nordquist Updated on February 12, 2020
In linguistics, a corpus is a collection of linguistic data (usually contained in a computer database) used for research, scholarship, and teaching. Also called a text corpus. Plural: corpora.
The first systematically organized computer corpus was the Brown University Standard Corpus of Present-Day American English (commonly known as the Brown Corpus), compiled in the 1960s by linguists Henry Kučera and W. Nelson Francis.
Notable English language corpora include the following:
The American National Corpus (ANC)
British National Corpus (BNC)
The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)
The International Corpus of English (ICE)
Advantages of Corpus Linguistics
"In 1992 [Jan Svartvik] presented the advantages of corpus linguistics in a preface to an influential collection of papers. His arguments are given here in abbreviated form:
- Corpus data are more objective than data based on introspection.
- Corpus data can easily be verified by other researchers and researchers can share the same data instead of always compiling their own.
- Corpus data are needed for studies of variation between dialects, registers and styles.
- Corpus data provide the frequency of occurrence of linguistic items.
- Corpus data do not only provide illustrative examples, but are a theoretical resource.
- Corpus data give essential information for a number of applied areas, like language teaching and language technology (machine translation, speech synthesis etc.).
- Corpora provide the possibility of total accountability of linguistic features--the analyst should account for everything in the data, not just selected features.
- Computerised corpora give researchers all over the world access to the data.
- Corpus data are ideal for non-native speakers of the language.
Additional Applications of Corpus-Based Research
The following practical applications may be mentioned.
Lexicography - Corpus-derived frequency lists and, more especially, concordances are establishing themselves as basic tools for the lexicographer. . . .
Language Teaching - The use of concordances as language-learning tools is currently a major interest
in computer-assisted language learning (CALL)
(Hans Lindquist, Corpus Linguistics and the Description of English. Edinburgh University Press, 2009)
Nordquist, Richard. "Definition and Examples of Corpora in Linguistics." ThoughtCo, Aug. 26, 2020, thoughtco.com/what-is-corpus-language-1689806.
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