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DRPS : Course Catalogue : School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences : Language Sciences

Postgraduate Course: Corpus Linguistics (MSc) (LASC11078)

Course Outline
SchoolSchool of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences CollegeCollege of Humanities and Social Science
Credit level (Normal year taken)SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) AvailabilityAvailable to all students
SCQF Credits20 ECTS Credits10
SummaryThis course covers the ways in which electronic text databases (corpora) can be used to do research in linguistics and language studies. Corpora can show the distribution of a word or construction, which can tell us about the structure or function of that item, and/or the way it patterns stylistically, socially, regionally, or historically.

Students will be exposed to a range of different corpora (spoken, written, historically and socially differentiated, single genre and multi-genre),and encouraged also to think of the internet as a corpus. We will look at the ways in which electronic texts are adapted for linguistic research through tagging and mark-up. Most sessions will be held in the teaching lab where students will learn to use concordancing software to extract and manipulate data.

We will not only make use 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.

The course assumes that students have not worked with electronic corpora before, and provides a basic introduction to corpora and how to use them. It builds on knowledge that students could be expected to have of, for example, syntax or discourse, and demonstrates how they can pursue research in this area with a new methodology.

Feedback Events:
The CO will meet students in Weeks 3 and 4 to discuss and advise on possible topics for their presentation and assignment.

The CO will provide feedback (the week immediately after their presentations) so that they can use the feedback to improve/shape their research paper.
Course description Not entered
Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
Pre-requisites Co-requisites
Prohibited Combinations Other requirements None
Information for Visiting Students
Pre-requisitesNone
Course Delivery Information
Not being delivered
Learning Outcomes
On successful completion of this module, 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

They should be able to:
- Develop and refine a query to extract data from a corpus
- Present and discuss corpus results
- Use corpus data to answer questions about vocabulary, morphology, syntax, pragmatics, sociolinguistic variation and language change
Reading List
None
Additional Information
Course URL Please use Learn
Graduate Attributes and Skills Not entered
Keywordselectronic corpora, concordancing, collocation, word frequency
Contacts
Course organiserDr Brona Murphy
Tel: (0131 6)51 6408
Email: brona.murphy@ed.ac.uk
Course secretaryMiss Toni Noble
Tel: (0131 6)51 3188
Email: Toni.noble@ed.ac.uk
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