Digital Corpora in Language Study: Reviewing a Success Story in the Recent History of Linguistics
Subject Areas : Research in English Language Pedagogy
Christian Mair
1
(English Department, Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany)
Keywords: Corpus linguistics, Digital humanities, Multilingualism, Progress in linguistics, Spoken language,
Abstract :
The contribution provides an overview of the fifty-year success story of corpus linguistics. It acknowledges the enormous technical advancements and the excellent corpus resources available today – at least for some of the major languages in the world. A direct consequence of technological development is the rise of usage-based theoretical models in contemporary linguistic research. At the same time, the contribution points out the still deficient treatment of spoken spontaneous language in corpus linguistics and recommends giving more attention to the development of multilingual corpus resources in the future than has been done so far. Finally, it raises the question of the future function of corpus linguistics within the framework of Digital Humanities.
Bartlett, J. (1913). A complete concordance or verbal index to words, phrases, and passages in the dramatic works of Shakespeare. Macmillan.
Fries, C. C. (1952). The structure of English: The construction of English sentences. Harcourt Brace.
Gatto, M. (2011). The ‘body’ and the ‘web’: The web as corpus ten years on. ICAME Journal 35, 35–58.
Greenbaum, S. & Nelson, G. (1996). The International Corpus of English (ICE) project. World Englishes, 15(1), 3–15.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1994). An introduction to functional grammar (2nd ed). Edward Arnold.
Leitner, G. (Ed.), The English reference grammar: Language and linguistics, writers and readers. Niemeyer.
Lodge, D. (2011). Small world. Random House.
Mair, C. (2011). Grammaticalization and corpus linguistics. In H. Narrog & B. Heine (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of grammaticalization (pp. 239–250). Oxford University Press.
McEnery, T. & Hardie, A. (2012). Corpus linguistics: Method, theory and practice. Cambridge University Press.
Narrog, H. & Heine B. (Eds.). (2011). The Oxford handbook of grammaticalization. Oxford University Press.
Sinclair, J. (1986). First, throw away your evidence! In G. Leitner (Ed.), The English reference grammar: Language and linguistics, writers and readers (pp. 56–64). Niemeyer.
Rudnicka, K. (2023). Can Grammarly and ChatGPT accelerate language change? AI-powered technologies and their impact on the English language: Wordiness vs. conciseness. Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural 71, 205-214.
Torrent, T. T., Hoffmann, T., Almeida, A. L., & Turner, M. (2023). Copilots for linguists: AI, constructions, and frames. Cambridge University Press.
Visser, F. T. (2002). An historical syntax of the English language. Brill Archive.