Here we go again!
Welcome everyone and let’s dive straight in to today’s topic which is Corpus Linguistics and Concordancing. To be perfectly honest I don’t fully understand these topics but let’s do our best to explore them together.
In short, “Corpus Linguistics is now seen as the study of linguistic phenomena through large collections of machine-readable texts: corpora. These are used within a number of research areas going from the Descriptive Study of the Syntax of a Language to Prosody or Language Learning” (University of Essex, 1998)
What this means in very simple terms is that if you wish to study things such as word frequency or the use of discourse makers in a particular language, compiling a database of texts written by native speakers (a corpus) and analysing these is one of the best ways to do so.
Concordancing can also be used to analyse differences in language. I recently downloaded a concordance app called AntConc, in order to analyse the implications of translating the phrase “to make a decision” into Japanese (one of my target languages) The result was both intruiging and amusing as it translates to “問題は誰が決定を下すかということだ。” the literal translate of which is “the problem is who makes the decison” This has some rather interesting implications as in the English phrase, the question of “who” is not even remotely involved, whereas the Japanese trabslation makes it a central part of the phrase, and this makes for some very interesting analysis.
Concordance and corpus can also be used to analyse indivudual speech patterns. For example, the following is a small analysis of the word frqeuency in Barack Obama’s written corpus on social media.
Corpus such as these are excellent resources from a linguistic and psychological point of view. We can determine the target audience and relative subject of the tweet just by looking at the adjectives and adverbs. Many linguists also carry out this work on a much larger scale.
What do you think of corpus and concordancing? Are they useful tools or just more of my babbling? Let me know in the comments below!
Until next time!
Amee x
Amee's Language Babbles 