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The Variability of Current World Englishes
The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics. _x000D_.
eBook
English Corpus Linguistics
English Corpus Linguistics is a step-by-step guide to creating and analyzing linguistic corpora. It begins with a discussion of the role that corpus linguistics plays in linguistic theory, demonstrating that corpora have proven to be very useful resources for linguists who believe that their theories and descriptions of English should be based on real rather than contrived data. Charles F. Meyer goes on to describe how to plan the creation of a corpus, how to collect and computerize data for inclusion in a corpus, how to annotate the data that are collected, and how to conduct a corpus analysis of a completed corpus. The book concludes with an overview of the challenges that corpus linguists face to make both the creation and analysis of corpora much easier undertakings than they currently are. Clearly organized and accessibly written, this book will appeal to students of linguistics and English language.
eBook
Response to Newmeyer's 'Grammar Is Grammar and Usage Is Usage'
In an article in a recent issue of Language (Newmeyer 2003), Frederick Newmeyer argues for a clear separation between what he terms ‘knowledge of language [i.e. grammar] and use of language [i.e. pragmatics]’ (682). In developing his argument, N makes frequent reference to linguistic analyses that are corpus-based, that is, centered on information taken from large datasets of actual speech or writing (e.g. transcriptions of conversations, newspaper articles, novels). In N’s view, grammar is distinct from pragmatics, and because a corpus contains examples of actual language use drawn from a large community of speakers and writers, it can yield only performance data. As a result, N argues, ‘there is no way that one can draw conclusions about the grammar of an individual from usage facts about communities, particularly communities from which the individual receives no speech input’ (696).
Journal Article
English Corpus Linguistics: An Introduction. Studies in English Language
This book is a step-by-step guide to creating and analyzing linguistic corpora. It defines a corpus as a collection of texts or parts of texts upon which some general linguistic analysis can be conducted. It begins with a discussion of the role that corpus linguistics plays in linguistic theory, demonstrating that corpora have proven to be very useful resources for linguists who believe that their theories and descriptions of English should be based on real, rather than contrived, data. It goes on to describe how to plan the creation of a corpus, how to collect and computerize data for inclusion in a corpus, how to annotate the data that are collected, and how to conduct a corpus analysis of a completed corpus. The book concludes with an overview of the future challenges that corpus linguists face to make both the creation and analysis of corpora much easier undertakings than they currently are. Two appendixes contain corpus resources and concordancing programs. (Contains approximately 185 references.) (SM)
Book
Data Collection
This chapter discusses the various ways that data can be collected for linguistic analysis. It begins by discussing “introspection,” a method of data collection that was common in generative approaches to linguistic analysis and involves individual judgments about the acceptability or grammaticality of sentences. It goes on to discuss more “empirically” based ways of obtaining data. For instance, in elicitation experiments, individuals are asked directly to make judgments about the grammaticality of individual instances. In the corpus‐based approach, large linguistic databases (“corpora”) of different types of spoken and/or written language are compiled and investigated to study how language is actually used. A central issue in this section is “representativeness”: how can we ensure that a corpus is maximally representative of the language or sub‐language that it samples? The chapter concludes by discussing the pros and cons of the recent use of the Internet as a source of linguistic data.
Book Chapter
Data Collection
This chapter contains section titled:
Introduction
Introspection
Experimentation
Corpus Building
Book Chapter
Planning the construction of a corpus
Before the texts to be included in a corpus are collected, annotated, and analyzed, it is important to plan the construction of the corpus carefully: what size it will be, what types of texts will be included in it, and what population will be sampled to supply the texts that will comprise the corpus. Ultimately, decisions concerning the composition of a corpus will be determined by the planned uses of the corpus. If, for instance, the corpus is be used primarily for grammatical analysis (e.g. the analysis of relative clauses or the structure of noun phrases), it can consist simply of text excerpts rather than complete texts. On the other hand, if the corpus is intended to permit the study of discourse features, then it will have to contain complete texts.Deciding how lengthy text samples within a corpus should be is but one of the many methodological considerations that must be addressed before one begins collecting data for inclusion in a corpus. To explore the process of planning a corpus, this chapter will consider the methodological assumptions that guided the compilation of the British National Corpus. Examining the British National Corpus reveals how current corpus planners have overcome the methodological deficiencies of earlier corpora, and raises more general methodological considerations that anyone planning to create a corpus must address.The British National CorpusAt approximately 100 million words in length, the British National Corpus (BNC) (see table 2.1) is one of the largest corpora ever created.
Book Chapter