Corpus Linguistics 09

Corpus Linguistics (2)

• Corpus linguistics is the empirical analysis of authentic language data using corpora
• A corpus is a collection of linguistic data, compiled following a design, often structured and annotated
• Corpus typology can include written/spoken, synchronic/diachronic data
• Frequently used corpus families include BROWN, ICE, COCA, BNC, GloWbE, and NOW
• Concordance is a method in corpus linguistics to highlight keywords in context
• AntConc is frequently used software in corpus linguistics
• Part-of-speech (POS) tagging provides grammatical information in a corpus

Today's Lecture

• Frequency
• Collocations
• Case Studies

1 Frequency: Quantitative and Qualitative Data Analysis

• Concordances are central to corpus linguistics
• Quantitative approaches count occurrences, compare frequencies, and use statistics to find patterns
• Qualitative approaches focus on how often a feature occurs, but rather to identify and describe language usage in context
• Data used as a basis for describing language usage providing real-life examples of phenomena

1 Frequency: Quantitative Data Analysis

• 'Outdooring' (V/N): the bringing 'out of doors' of a child after seven days

  • GloWbE: 72 hits (1 from Canada, 71 from Ghana)
  • NOW: 339 hits (1 each from Canada, Nigeria, South Africa and US; 336 from Ghana)

• 'Outdoored' (verb)

  • GloWbE: 64 hits (1 from Nigeria, 63 from Ghana)
  • NOW: 438 hits (1 each from Kenya, Nigeria, 6 from South Africa, 430 from Ghana)

• Good evidence that the tradition of 'outdooring' is very Ghanaian

• The 'outdooring' and naming ceremony starts when a family elder pours libation

• A child is considered human after being outdoored

• NDC (National Democratic Congress) succeeded since its outdooring in Cape Coast in 1992

• African Union (AU) replaced the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in 2002

• Frequency analysis among the most common in corpus linguistics

• Find all instances of a construction (e.g., in GloWbE)

• Find words and spelling variations

• All word forms for the lemma 'GIVE'

• Frequency of fixed expressions (e.g., merry Christmas vs. happy Christmas)

• Comparison of frequencies across varieties and over time (e.g., GloWbE; "GO on holiday" vs. "GO on vacation," COHA "telephone" vs. "phone")

1 Frequency: Types and Tokens

• Token: total number of words/constructions in a text, corpus or sub-corpus
• Type: total number of different words/ constructions in a text, corpus, or sub-corpus
• ICE GB: 1,071,926 tokens and 34,421 types
• Each sample contains ~2,000 words, with complete sentences
• Tags are included in the token count

1 Frequency: Type-Token Ratio (TTR)

• TTR: a measure of diversification
• Calculated as the number of types divided by the number of tokens, multiplied by 100
• TTR for ICE GB is approximately 3.2
• TTR is strongly dependent on corpus size, usually higher in smaller corpora

1 Frequency: Comparing Frequencies

• Corpora often have different sizes

  • Compare frequencies, normalize data
  • Calculate per-X-word frequency
    • per-million-word (pmw), per-thousand-word (ptw)

• Example: Compare frequency of "Scotland" in spoken vs. written sections of ICE-GB

Activity 2: Comparing Frequencies

• COHA search for "television" yields results by decade

2 Collocations: Introduction

• Collocations: predictable word combinations
• How to determine predictablility? Native speaker intuition & learned construction
• Examples include "fast food" vs. "slow food," "quick food" vs. "unhurried food," "quick shower" vs. "fast shower"

2 Collocations: AntConc

• Create word frequency list in the Word list tab
• Enter search term (word, construction or regular expression) in the Collocates tab
• Set the window span (e.g., 1L, 3R)
• Choose minimum collocate frequency (n)

3 Case Studies: The Americanization of English

• Many factors attribute to American English gaining prominence (e.g., globalization, popular culture, media exposure)
• American English usage observed in other varieties
• Likely strongest in Canada and Philippines, least likely in Great Britain

3 Case Studies: The Americanization of English - Lexis

• Dozens of words list differing between British and American English
• Categorical lists for concepts (cf. OALD)
• Examples include "chips" vs. "fries," "crisp" vs. "chip", "aubergine" vs. "eggplant"

3 Case Studies: The Americanization of English - Lexis (GloWbE)

• Include nouns only in analysis
• Extend analysis to include plural forms, capitalized terms
• Examine normalized frequencies (GloWbE components - US/GB/others)

3 Case Studies: The Americanization of English - Past Tense

• Examine past tense forms using GloWbE

Keywords

• Americanization
• Collocation
• Construction
• Frequency
• PMW
• Qualitative
• Quantitative
• Semantic shift
• Token
• Type
• Type/token ratio (TTR)