Chapter published in:
Corpus Linguistics and African Englishes
Edited by Alexandra U. Esimaje, Ulrike Gut and Bassey E. Antia
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 88] 2019
► pp. 7–36

Chapter 1.1
What is corpus linguistics?

| Benson Idahosa University
| University of Birmingham

Corpus Linguistics has made great strides in language research and teaching but it is only fairly known, and thus its potentials lost, to many African academics and linguistic communities. The aim of this chapter is to introduce corpus linguistics to those African researchers and others who are not yet familiar with, or have limited knowledge of, the field and who are interested in using this method for linguistic analysis. The chapter introduces the concept of corpus linguistics (Section 1), explains some of the key terms and concepts used in it (Section 2), and considers the types of corpora, as well as the scope and applications of corpus linguistics (Section 3).

Article outline
  • 1.The concept of corpus linguistics
    • Corpus: A definition
    • Corpus linguistics: History and significance
      • Languages
      • Size
      • Specialisation
      • Individuals and software
      • Statistics
    • Corpus linguistics: Historical debates
  • 2.Key concepts in corpus linguistics
    • Corpus design
    • Content
    • Size
    • Balance
    • Representativeness
    • Corpus output
    • Corpus annotation
    • Tagging
    • Parsing
    • Error tagging
    • Semantic tagging
  • 3.Types and applications of corpora
    • Types of corpora
      • General corpus
      • Specialised corpus
      • Comparable and parallel corpora
      • Learner corpus
      • Diachronic corpus
    • Available corpora and software
    • The scope and applications of corpus linguistics
    • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 February 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.88.02esi
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