Corpus Linguistics: Volume 1

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2008
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 796
• Series: Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft / Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science [HSK]; 29/1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This volume provides an up-to-date survey of the field of corpus linguistics, a field whose methodology has revolutionized much of the empirical work done in most fields of linguistic study over the past decade.

Corpus linguistics investigates human language by starting out from large collections of texts - spoken, written, or recorded. These language corpora, which are now regularly available in electronic form, are the basis for quantitative and qualitative research on almost any question of linguistic interest. Many techniques that are in use in corpus linguistics today are rooted in the tradition of the late 18th and 19th century, when linguistics began to make use of mathematical and empirical methods. Modern corpus linguistics has used and developed these methods in close connection with computer science and computational linguistics.

The handbook sketches the history of corpus linguistics, shows its potential, discusses its problems, and describes various methods of collecting, annotating, and searching corpora as well as processing corpus data. It also reports case studies that illustrate the wide range of linguistic research questions addressed in corpus linguistics. The over 60 articles included in the handbook are divided into five sections:
(1) the origins and history of corpus linguistics and surveys of its relationship to central fields of linguistics
(2) corpus compilation 
(3) corpus types
(4) preprocessing of corpora
(5) the use and exploitation of corpora.

The final section gives an overview of the results of corpus studies obtained in phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, stylometry, dialectology, and discourse analysis. It also reports on recent advances made in human and machine translation, contrastive studies, computer-assisted language learning, and automatic summarization.

The contributors to the volume are internationally known experts in their respective fields. The handbook is intended for a wide audience ranging from teachers, university students, and scholars to anyone interested in the use of computers in linguistic analyses and applications.

✦ Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Contents
1. Pre-electronic corpora
2. Early generative linguistics and empirical methodology
3. Some aspects of the development of corpus linguistics in the 1970s and 1980s
4. Corpus linguistics and historical linguistics
5. Theory-driven and corpus-driven computational linguistics, and the use of corpora
6. Corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics
7. Corpora and language teaching
8. Corpus linguistics and lexicography
9. Collection strategies and design decisions
10. Text corpora
11. Speech corpora and spoken corpora
12. Multimodal corpora
13. Treebanks
14. Historical corpora
15. Learner corpora
16. Parallel and comparable corpora
17. Corpora of computer-mediated communication
18. Web linguistics
19. Large text networks as an object of corpus linguistic studies
20. Well-known and influential corpora
21. Corpora of less studied languages
22. Annotation standards
23. Development of tag sets for part-of-speech tagging
24. Tokenizing and part-of-speech tagging
25. Lemmatising and morphological tagging
26. Sense and semantic tagging
27. Corpora for anaphora and coreference resolution
28. Syntactic preprocessing
29. Pragmatic annotation
30. Preprocessing speech corpora: Transcription and phonological annotation
31. Preprocessing multimodal corpora
32. Preprocessing multilingual corpora
33. Searching and concordancing
34. Searching treebanks and other structured corpora
35. Linguistically annotated corpora: Quality assurance, reusability and sustainability