Understanding Corpus Linguistics

Danielle Barth is a university lecturer in the School of Culture, History, and Language at the Australian National University and in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. She works with a language community in Matukar, Papua New Guinea. Her areas of research are quantitative corpus linguistics, typology, and linguistic variation. She is a co-developer of the multilingual corpus SCOPIC.Stefan Schnell is a senior researcher in the Department of Comparative Language Science at the University of Zurich. He has undertaken documentary work on Oceanic languages from North Vanuatu (South Pacific). In recent years, he has been engaged in cross-corpus research into typological questions of morphosyntactic patterns in language use and its interaction with discourse structure. He is a co-developer and co-editor of the multilingual corpus Multi-CAST

• 1 Introduction2 Basic concepts in corpus linguistics3 Corpus composition and corpus types4 Levels of linguistic representation in corpus linguistic research5. Corpus Queries6 Corpus building7 Corpus annotation8 Statistical description and analysis9 Corpora in Sociolinguistics10 Corpus linguistics and language documentation11 Corpus-based typology

'Corpora – large and small – are central to linguistics and we need be able to recognise their potential and limitations. This excellent book is a storehouse of such wisdom. Barth and Schnell offer practical guidance for building and exploring a corpus, and they draw extensively on international scholarship which demonstrates the richness of corpus-based enquiry.'Miriam Meyerhoff, University of Oxford, UK