Corpus linguistics: issues, methods and tools 1500-SDN-JK
Language corpora are increasingly used in research in linguistics, but also in other social sciences and literary studies. They provide access to vast resources of authentic and natural, written and oral linguistic production, and thus facilitate a more accurate and reliable analysis of language at its many levels: phonetic and phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical, phraseological, semantic, pragmatic and at the discourse level. Thanks to corpora, new methods of linguistic data analysis were created, emphasizing the concept of frequency and the phenomenon of language patterns. Corpus linguistics also proposes a new approach to language description based on probability rather than rules.
The course provides an overview of issues related to corpus linguistics. Its scope includes the presentation of the most important research directions in this field and a discussion of corpus research methods. Basic descriptive and inferential statistics used in this type of research will also be presented. Participants will also have the opportunity to learn about the possibilities of using many generally available corpus resources in Polish and English as well as tools for corpus data analysis, including in particular the SketchEngine platform.
The course will include presentations of the selected issues supplemented with workshop tasks. The main emphasis will be on the presentation and overview of the field rather than the technical skills of using the software. Classes will be conducted in Polish, but the examples of corpus data and analyses will come from various languages, mainly English.
Type of course
Course coordinators
Assessment criteria
class attendance (three absences permitted)
participation in class discussions of selected academic papers
completing a short corpus-based project on a topic selected by the student and approved by the instructor
Bibliography
Textbooks in Polish:
Chlebda, W. (Ed.). (2013). Na tropach korpusów: W poszukiwaniu optymalnych zbiorów tekstów. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Opolskiego.
Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, B. (Ed.). (2005). Podstawy językoznawstwa korpusowego. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego.
Textbooks in English:
Biber, D., & Reppen, R. (Eds.). (2015). The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139764377
McEnery, T., & Brezina, V. (2022). Fundamental Principles of Corpus Linguistics. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781107110625
McEnery, T., & Hardie, A. (2011). Corpus Linguistics: Method, Theory and Practice. Cambridge University Press.
O’Keeffe, A., & McCarthy, M. (Eds.). (2022). The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics (2nd edition). Routledge.
Paquot, M., & Gries, S. T. (Eds.). (2021). A Practical Handbook of Corpus Linguistics. Springer.
Additional reading:
Selected papers in Polish and English which serve as examples of corpus-based studies in different areas of linguistics
Notes
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Term 2025Z:
Polish, but examples of corpus studies as well as the readings also in English |
Additional information
Additional information (registration calendar, class conductors, localization and schedules of classes), might be available in the USOSweb system: