Introduction to Corpus Linguistics
Václav Březina, Tony McEnery
Abstract
Corpus linguistics started to develop as a separate discipline in the 1960s, although early examples of corpus analysis were available, and has flourished since the 1990s – hand in hand with the development of computational technology. In essence, corpus linguistics analyses the information about the frequencies of occurrence of linguistic features and the contexts of their use in language sampled in corpora, a perspective that is unique to corpus analysis. Quantitative techniques in corpus linguistics involve the counting of linguistically meaningful items, e.g. words, phrases and grammatical structures. To be able to systematically evaluate quantitative evidence, corpus linguistics relies on statistical procedures to collect and analyze the data. Corpus linguistics has the aspiration to be a scientific discipline hence it strives for the standardization of its procedures and calls for more methodological rigor and replication. General corpora can also be used as reference corpora in second language research representing the target use of linguistic features.