Paradoxically, doing corpus linguistics is both easier and harder than it has ever been before. On the one hand, it is easier because we have access to more existing corpora, more corpus analysis software tools, and more statistical methods than ever before. On the other hand, reliance on these existing corpora and corpus linguistic methods can potentially create layers of distance between the researcher and the language in a corpus, making it a challenge to do linguistics with a corpus. The goal of this Element is to explore ways for us to improve how we approach linguistic research questions with quantitative corpus data. We introduce and illustrate the major steps in the research process, including how to: select and evaluate corpora, establish linguistically-motivated research questions, observational units and variables, select linguistically interpretable variables, understand and evaluate existing corpus software tools, adopt minimally sufficient statistical methods, and qualitatively interpret quantitative findings.

Doing Corpus Linguistics offers a practical step-by-step introduction to corpus linguistics, making use of widely available corpora and of a register analysis-based theoretical framework to provide students in Applied Linguistics and TESOL with the understanding and skills necessary to meaningfully analyze corpora and carry out successful corpus-based research. Divided into three parts – Introduction to Doing Corpus Linguistics and Register Analysis; Searches in Available Corpora; and Building Your Own Corpus, Analyzing Your Quantitative Results, and Making Sense of Data – the book emphasizes hands-on experience with performing language analysis research and in interpreting findings in a meaningful and engaging way. Readers are given multiple opportunities to analyze and apply language data by completing smaller tasks and corpus projects using publicly available corpora. The book also takes readers through the process of building a specialized corpus designed to answer a specific research question and provides detailed information on completing a final research project that includes both a written paper and an oral presentation of their specific research projects. Doing Corpus Linguistics provides students in applied linguistics and TESOL with the opportunity to gain proficiency in the technical and interpretive aspects of corpus research and to encourage them to participate in the growing field of corpus linguistics.

Corpora are used widely in linguistics, but not always wisely. This book attempts to frame corpus linguistics systematically as a variant of the observational method. The first part introduces the reader to the general methodological discussions surrounding corpus data as well as the practice of doing corpus linguistics, including issues such as the scientific research cycle, research design, extraction of corpus data and statistical evaluation. The second part consists of a number of case studies from the main areas of corpus linguistics (lexical associations, morphology, grammar, text and metaphor), surveying the range of issues studied in corpus linguistics while at the same time showing how they fit into the methodology outlined in the first part.

The first textbook of its kind, Quantitative Corpus Linguistics with R demonstrates how to use the open source programming language R for corpus linguistic analyses. Computational and corpus linguists doing corpus work will find that R provides an enormous range of functions that currently require several programs to achieve – searching and processing corpora, arranging and outputting the results of corpus searches, statistical evaluation, and graphing.

This book is about investigating the way people use language in speech and writing. It introduces the corpus-based approach to linguistics, based on analysis of large databases of real language examples stored on computer. Each chapter focuses on a different area of linguistics, including lexicography, grammar, discourse, register variation, language acquisition, and historical linguistics. Example analyses are presented in each chapter to provide concrete descriptions of the research methods and advantages of corpus-based techniques. Ten methodology boxes provide clear and concise explanations of the issues in doing corpus-based research and reading corpus-based studies and there is a useful appendix of resources for corpus-based investigation. This lucid and comprehensive introduction to the subject will be welcomed by a broad range of readers, from undergraduate students to professional researchers.

This theoretical and practical guide to using corpus linguistic techniques in stylistic analysis focuses on how to use off-the-shelf corpus software, such as AntConc, Wmatrix, and the Brigham Young University (BYU) corpus interface.

Doing Corpus Linguistics offers a practical step-by-step introduction to corpus linguistics, making use of widely available corpora and of a register analysis-based theoretical framework to provide students in applied linguistics and TESOL with the understanding and skills necessary to meaningfully analyze corpora and carry out successful corpus-based research. This second edition has been thoroughly revised and updated with fresh exercises, examples, and references, as well as an extensive list of English corpora around the world. It also provides more clarity around the approach used in the book, contains new sections on how to identify patterns in texts, and now covers Cohen’s statistical method. This practical and applied text emphasizes hands-on experience with performing language analysis research and interpreting findings in a meaningful and engaging way. Readers are given multiple opportunities to analyze language data by completing smaller tasks and corpus projects using publicly available corpora. The book also takes readers through the process of building a specialized corpus designed to answer a specific research question and offers detailed information on completing a final research project that includes both a written paper and an oral presentation of the reader’s specific research projects. Doing Corpus Linguistics provides students in applied linguistics and TESOL with the opportunity to gain proficiency in the technical and interpretive aspects of corpus research and to encourage them to participate in the growing field of corpus linguistics.