Corpus linguistics is one of the most exciting approaches to studies in applied linguistics today. From its quantitative beginnings it has grown to become an essential aspect of research methodology in a range of fields, often combining with text analysis, CDA, pragmatics and organizational studies to reveal important new insights about how language works. This volume captures some of the most stimulating and significant developments in the field, including chapters on language teaching, institutional and professional discourse, English as an International Language, translation, forensics and media studies.
Digital Literary Studies presents a broad and varied picture of the promise and potential of methods and approaches that are crucially dependent upon the digital nature of the literary texts it studies and the texts and collections of texts with which they are compared. It focuses on style, diction, characterization, and interpretation of single works and across larger groups of texts, using both huge natural language corpora and smaller, more specialized collections of texts created for specific tasks, and applies statistical techniques used in the narrower confines of authorship attribution to broader stylistic questions.
Computer-assisted translation (CAT) has always used translation memories, which require the translator to have a corpus of previous translations that the CAT software can use to generate bilingual lexicons. This can be problematic when the translator does not have such a corpus, for instance, when the text belongs to an emerging field.
Corpus-Based Studies in Language Use, Language Learning, and Language Documentation (Language and Computers)
This volume consists of selected papers from the 2009 meeting of the American Association for Corpus Linguistics. The chapters cover aspects of language use (usage-based accounts of morphology/syntax of English and Tok Pisin), language learning (corpus-based learning of English, syntactic development observable in a Learner Corpus of English, "core" vocabulary items for learners of English) and language documentation (a new and innovative usage-based frequency dictionary of English, proposals to broaden the traditional understanding of a corpus in various directions, e.g., constructing a corpus of the content of Japanese manga comics).
Multiple Affordances of Language Corpora for Data-driven Learning
In recent years, corpora have found their way into language instruction, albeit often indirectly, through their role in syllabus and course design and in the production of teaching materials and other resources. An alternative and more innovative use is for teachers and students alike to explore corpus data directly as part of the learning process.