Undergraduate Course: Corpus Linguistics (LASC10055)
Course Outline
| School | School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 3 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This 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. |
| Course description |
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.
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Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | Visiting students should have at least 3 Linguistics/Language Sciences courses at grade B or above (or be predicted to obtain this). We will only consider University/College level courses. |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
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
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Keywords | electronic corpora,concordancing,collocation,word frequency |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Brona Murphy
Tel: (0131 6)51 6408
Email: brona.murphy@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Miss Emma Nelson
Tel: (0131 6)51 5505
Email: Emma.Nelson@ed.ac.uk |
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