Corpus Linguistics

This course is an introduction to the fast growing field of corpus linguistics. It aims to familiarise students with key concepts and common methods used in the construction of language corpora, as well as tools that have been developed for searching and using major corpora such as the British National Corpus. Students will be given hands-on experience in pre-editing, annotating, and searching corpora. Criteria and methods used for evaluating corpora and analytical tools will also be discussed. This course introduces basic corpus skills for linguists: Marking up extra information Selecting text The range of existing corpora How to build your own corpus Using corpora to test linguistic hypotheses Using corpora to train language tools