Corpus Linguistics (U03150)

? Credit Points : 20 ? SCQF Level : 10 ? Acronym : PPL-3-CL-LS

Students will be exposed to a range of different corpora (spoken, written, multi-register and multi-genre), including current developments such as the use of the internet as a corpus. The ways in which electronic texts are adapted for linguistic research through tagging and mark-up will be looked at. English corpora will be used for practice but students will be encouraged to look at corpora of other languages and parallel corpora where these are available. There will be regular weekly practical sessions in which students learn to use concordancing software to extract and manipulate data.

Different sections will address the use of corpora to answer questions in syntax, morphology, semantics and pragmatics. Some of these findings in turn may provide information about sociolinguistic variation, language change and first and second language acquisition. Not only will use be made of collocational data but also word frequency lists, which can be used to estimate vocabulary size and to make inferences about how words are remembered and parsed by speakers.

? Keywords : electronic corpora, concordancing, collocation,
word frequency

Entry Requirements

? Pre-requisites : English Language 2 OR Linguistics 2A and 2B OR Linguistics 2B and 2L

? Special Arrangements for Entry : In order for a student to be enrolled, you must contact the course secretary as places are limited to 38, due to the availability of lab space.

Subject Areas

Home subject area

Language Sciences, (School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, Schedule I)

Delivery Information

? Normal year taken : 3rd year

? Delivery Period : Semester 1 (Blocks 1-2)

? Contact Teaching Time : 3 hour(s) per week for 9 weeks

First Class Information

Date	Start	End	Room	Area	Additional Information
18/09/2007	10:00	10:50	Room B.B12, Adam Ferguson Building	Central

All of the following classes

Type	Day	Start	End	Area
Lecture	Monday	10:00	10:50	Central
Lecture	Tuesday	10:00	10:50	Central
Lecture	Thursday	10:00	10:50	Central

Summary of Intended Learning Outcomes

On successful completion of this course, students should have
an understanding of the construction of different corpora and what kinds of data they are able to provide;
a broad sense of the applications of electronic corpora;
and should be able to
access and manipulate corpus data;
use corpus data answer to questions in linguistic theory.

Assessment Information

1. A portfolio consisting of a range of responses to weekly exercises (worth 40%)
2. A more in-depth project of 2500 words (excluding data) related to one section of the course (worth 60%)