Using Corpora in Language Learning

Using Corpora
in Linguistics
Introduction to WordSmith Tools
for Beginners
Íde O’Sullivan
Regional Writing Centre
www.ul.ie/rwc
Corpus Linguistics

McEnery and Wilson (2001:1) describe
corpus linguistics as “the study of
language based on examples of ‘real life’
language use”.
McEnery, T. and Wilson, A. (2001) (2nd
edition) Corpus Linguistics. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
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Corpus: Definition

“A corpus is [the name given to] a set of
texts which has been put together for
some purpose, usually (though not
necessarily), in computer-readable form”
(Wray, Trott & Bloomer, 1990:213).
Wray, T., Trott, K. & Bloomer, A. (1998)
Projects in Linguistics: A Practical Guide to
Researching Language. London, New York:
Arnold.
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Corpus: Definition

“a corpus typically implies a finite body of
text,
sampled
to
be
maximally
representative of a particular variety of a
language, and which can be stored and
manipulated using a computer” McEnery
and Wilson (2001:73).

Corpus ≠ Archive
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Concordancing: Definition

“A concordance, in its simplest form, is an
alphabetical listing of the words in a text,
given together with the contexts in which
they appear”.
Catherine Ball, Concordances & Corpora:
Tutorial:
http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ballc/cor
pora/tutorial.html
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Concordancing: Definition

“A concordance is a list of examples of a
particular word, part of a word or combination of
words, in its contexts drawn from a text corpus.
The search word is sometimes also referred to as
a keyword. The most common way of displaying
a concordance is by a series of lines h the
keyword in context (KWIC)”.
Kettemann, B. (1995) “Concordancing in stylistics
teaching”, in Grosser, W., Hogg, J. and Hubmeyer, K.
(eds), Style: Literary and Non-Literary. Contemporary
Trends in Cultural Stylistics. New York: The Edwin Mellen
Press: 307-318.
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Software to Analyse Corpora

“Concordancing software enables you to
discover patterns that exist in natural
language by grouping text in such a way that
they are clearly visible […] The real value of
the concordancer lies in this question of
visibility” (Tribble & Jones, 1997:3).
Tribble,
C.
and
Jones,
G.
(1997)
Concordances in the Classroom: Using
Corpora in Language Education. Houston TX:
Athelstan.
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Using Corpora in Language
Learning and Teaching
Organisation of the CD
 This CD contains a collection of small genrespecific academic and journalistic corpora in
English, French, Gaeilge, German and
Spanish.
 For each language there are two small genrespecific corpora: a journalistic corpus
(100,000 words) and an academic corpus
(50,000 words). The journalistic corpora are
divided into four subcorpora: current affairs,
editorials, reviews and sport. The academic
corpora are divided into two subcorpora:
theses and articles.
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Using Corpora in Language
Learning and Teaching
Organisation of the CD
Languages:
English, French, Gaeilge, German, Spanish
Academic Corpus
50,000 words
Theses
25,000
Articles
25,000
Journalistic Corpus
100,000 words
Current Affairs
44,000
paper 1
paper 2
Editorial
22,000
paper 1
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paper 2
Reviews
12,000
paper 1
paper 2
Sport
22,000
paper 1
paper 2
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Sources of Journalistic Corpora
English: Irish Examiner
Irish Independent
Irish Times
French: Le Monde
L’Humanité
Gaeilge: Beo
Foinse
Lá
German: Die Süddeutsche Zeitung
Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Spanish: La Vanguardia
El Periódico
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Sources of Academic Corpora

Articles and thesis written by native speakers

Subject Areas:
Literature,
Cultural Studies,
Translation Studies, Education,
Applied Linguistics, Sociolinguistics,
Corpus Linguistics, Media Studies,
Language Pedagogy, Teacher Training,
Discourse Analysis, Politics,
Research Methodology,
Second Language Acquisition,
History of Language
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WordSmith Tools

Wordlists





Frequency
Alphabetical order
Statistical information
Keywords
Concord





Collocations
Clusters
Patterns
Plot
Source text
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WordSmith Tools

Concord
 Sorting data
 Concord expansion option
 Concordance with multiple views
 Settings
 Wildcards
 Advanced searching
 Close texts
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Worksheet


Run individual wordlists for the Academic
Corpus and the Journalistic Corpus. Compare
and contrast your findings to reach relative
conclusions about each genre.
Run a concordance lists for a chosen aspect of
the language:
 Do any collocational patterns emerge from
this evidence?
 What are the most common clusters including
the search word(s).
 Identify the most common uses of the word.
 Are their exceptions to these uses?
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Resources

WordSmith Tools:
http://www.lexically.net/wordsmith/

MonoConc and ParaConc
http://www.athel.com/mono.html
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Online Resources

Tim Johns Data-driven Learning Page:
http://www.eisu.bham.ac.uk/johnstf/tim
conc.htm
Mike Barlow:
http://www.athel.com/corpus.html
 Other resources:
http://www.ul.ie/~appliedlanguages/LI4
113_C&C_websites.doc

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Online Concordancing
Hong Kong Virtual Language Centre
http://www.edict.com.hk/concordance/de
fault.htm
 The Compleat Lexical Tutor (Lextutor)
http://www.lextutor.ca/
 French Learner Language Oral Corpus
(flloc)
http://www.flloc.soton.ac.uk/

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Resources
Freeware Concordancers
 ConcApp:
http://www.edict.com.hk/pub/concapp/
 Create your own corpus - Disposable
corpus
 Issues of copyright
 Issue of reliability
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Resources

British National Corpus (corpus demo)
http://info.ox.ac.uk/bnc/

Cobuild Bank of English (wordbanks
online)
http://www.cobuild.collins.co.uk/

Corpus Concordance Sampler
http://www.collins.co.uk/Corpus/Corpus
Search.aspx
 Limerick Corpus of Irish-English (L-CIE):
http://www.ul.ie/~lcie/
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