1/23

LELA 30922Lecture 2

Corpus-based research in Linguistics

See esp. Meyer pp. 11-29

2/23

What is corpus linguistics?

• Not a branch of linguistics, like socio~, psycho~, …

• Not a theory of linguistics

• A set of tools and methods (and a philosophy) to support linguistic investigation across all branches of the subject

3/23

Reminder

• Assessment for this course is to use corpus/corpora to investigate something

• This lecture may give you some ideas of the kind of thing you can do

4/23

Applications of corpus linguistics

• Lexicology• Grammatical studies• Study of language variation• Historical linguistics• Contrastive analysis and translation theory• Study of language acquisition (psycholinguistics)• Language teaching

5/23

Lexicology

• Study of behaviour of individual words• Particularly useful for dictionary

construction (lexicography)• Can identify more and less frequently

occurring words• More interesting is HOW words are used

– Syntax– Meaning

6/23

Lexicology

• Most frequent words are function words (the, of, and, to, a are 5 most frequent words in LOB)

• If corpus is small, it can only give an indicative “snapshot” of word usage

• LOB (1m words): hundreds of words occur less than 10 times

7/23

Lexicography

• For dictionary construction, need bigger corpus• “Monitor” corpus, constantly updated and added

to• Traditional lexicography: collection of “slips” by

experts– OED took 50 years and includes 5m citations, sorted

and edited manually• Same idea, but more systematic• Dictionary as descriptive rather than pre- (or pro-)

scriptive

8/23

Lexicography

• Collins COBUILD – Birmingham corpus (20m words, 1980s)

– Bank of English corpus (415m words in Oct 2000)• 70m words of transcripts of BBC broadcasts

• Used as basis of BBC English dictionary

• Cambridge Language Survey• Longman’s corpus of American English, and use

of BNC for (BrE) dictionary

9/23

Lexicography: how do corpora help?

• Concordancing– Lists occurrences of word in context– Identify syntactic use of word– Identify range of meanings – Identify relative frequency of different uses/meanings

• Collocation– What words occur together?– Compare distribution of close synonyms

• Dictionaries can be subjective– Can be interesting to compare meanings/uses given by dictionaries with

actual usage in corpora

http://www.collins.co.uk/corpus/CorpusSearch.aspx

10/23

11/23

Target word = dogSignificance measure: t-score

12/23

Grammatical studies

• Study of a particular grammatical construction– Restrictions on form, meaning or context– Overall frequency (eg relative to alternative

constructions)– Use in different registers (eg narrative vs

argumentative) or modes (eg written vs spoken)

13/23

Examples of grammatical studies

• Appositives – eg George Bush, US president or US president George Bush)

– See CF Meyer “Can you really study language variation in linguistic corpora?” American Speech 79.4 (2004) 339-355

– Genuine titles, “pseudotitles”, descriptives• Junichiro Koizumi, the Japanese prime minister

• Gerald Ford, former president of the USA

• Osama bin Laden, America’s no.1 enemy

– Looked at how appositives (esp. pseudotitles) are used differently in newspaper reports from different countries, and how descriptives become pseudotitles

14/23

Examples of grammatical studies

• Clefts and pseudoclefts– It’s linguistics that interests me most.– What interests me most is linguistics.– Linguistics interests me most.

• Infinitival complement clauses– I hope to go ~ I hope that I can go– I’m happy to go ~ I’m happy that I can go– … the proposal to go ~ the proposal that I go

• Simple past vs perfective verb forms• Use of modals can~may, shall~will• Use of passive, and means/reasons to avoid

– eg especially in translation

15/23

Grammatical studies

• Most try to investigate the factors that determine choice of one construction over another– Lexical– Grammatical– Stylistic– etc

16/23

Grammatical studies

• Corpus needs to be sufficiently marked up and tools need to be available for examples to be extracted

• Corpus may need to be sufficiently large to get good number of examples

• If comparing registers/subject domains/modes, corpus needs to reflect these

17/23

Study of language variation

• Both lexical and grammatical studies often contrast usage by mode, domain, register etc.

• Sociolinguists often interested in other aspects, eg sex, age, social class of author or audience; historical linguists interested in change over time

• Recent corpora (eg BNC) have included this information in header mark-up

• Simple examples– lovely used more by females than males– What does cool mean?

18/23

Genre classification

• Are there lexical and grammatical factors that can help us to classify text genres?

• Biber used statistical measures to identify stylistic factors that co-occurred, and could therefore be definitional of text types and genres– Eg conjuncts like therefore, nevertheless and use of passive

together indicate more formal style

• Factor analysis – choose a range of features to measure, see which ones are

correlated– does not (necessarily) predetermine analysis (except obviously you

have to decide what features might be significant)

19/23

Historical linguistics

• Similar things can be done with historical texts, though (obviously) these are more limited in terms of genre

• Also, diachronic studies can compare texts from different periods (again as long as you compare like for like as much as possible)

• Topics:– Change in lexical meaning/usage– Change/emergence of grammatical constructions

20/23

Example of historical study

• Nevalainen in J. Engl. Ling (2000) used Corpus of Early English Correspondence (U. Helsinki) to track sex roles in linguistic innovation

• Popular theory that females more innovative, and males follow trends

• He analysed sex-of-author differences in three linguistic changes between 16th and 20th century:– Replacement of ye by you in subject position– Replacement of 3rd-person verb suffix -th by -s– Reduction in use of multiple negatives and use of any

and ever instead

21/23

Contrastive analysis, translation theory

• Parallel corpora – texts + their translations– preferably “aligned”

• Comparable corpora – Texts in different languages but of a similar

nature– What parallels are there in genre

characteristics?

22/23

Use of parallel corpora

• Aligned corpus allows search for word or phrase and its translation– How is it translated?– Is it translated consistently?

• Of interest in studies of “translationese”– Translated text too influenced by original– Certain constructions more prevalent in translation than in native

text• Evidence of “explicitation”

– Translation is often more explicit than original – Sometimes, explanation added for foreign reader– But often, just a reflection of the translator’s effort (eg replacement

of pronoun by more explicit referent)• Also can be used as a tool for translators

23/23

Language acquisition

• First-language acquisition– CHILDES database (Child Language Data Exchange

System) http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/– Transcriptions of conversations with (and between)

young children– Includes software to help extract data

• Second-language acquisition– Learner corpora, notably ICLE– http://www.fltr.ucl.ac.be/FLTR/GERM/ETAN/CECL/

Cecl-Projects/Icle/icle.htm