Welcome, avid learner of linguistics in this video I want to introduce you to
the wonderful world of corpora which can serve as a really helpful tool when
it comes to research in linguistics. I recall reading a text around
grammatical change by Laurie Bauer in which he describes how he tried to
figure out how the rule of comparing adjectives changed over time and what he
did is he read through lots and lots of newspapers to scan them for adjectives
in comparative to see whether two-syllable words had an "-er" added
or if they were preceded by a work "more" But, poor guy, his job would have been so much
easier had there been computers and digital text around in the time those newspapers
printed so what's the point of this though
well what Bauer did was he basically treated those newspapers like a corpus
Alright, what is the corpus? If you know me you know that I like to explain words
by saying where they come from so here you go
I'm so predictable. The word corpus comes from Latin and means body and
incidentally
it's the same route for the word corpse for obvious reasons I guess
So a corpus as a body - we've established that bad what kind of body? Coming to think of
it using the word "body" is really just a metaphor I think I'll just post a link to
my metaphor video somewhere around here
definition a corpus is a collection of authentic texts commonly used for the
purpose of research yes it's that simple
By "authentic" we mean that text file written by native speakers. And in a way really
everything can be a corpus: newspapers, novels, recipes, facebook posts, tweets you
name it. how does it all work well let's assume you're a massive Justin Bieber
fan dear viewer which could be about accurate ever look at the demographics
of my videos. So you're a Justin Bieber fan and you want to dedicate your time to
analyzing his linguistic prowess
what you could do is you could gather every single tweet he has ever written
and save them in one file. Now this is your corpus: A very simple one but
it's fully functional ready and with the right software you can now look at
things in your Belieber corpus such as work frequency, collocation or even
concordance but what are those three things I'm so glad you asked
let me show you that with an example I have not compiled a Justin Bieber corpus
though because f*ck it time's too precious I just take a simple text file one of my
literary studies assignments and run it through a free software called AntConc
right word frequency helps you check how often a word appears in a text. this can
be really useful because that will allow you to make statements about the
register and audience of the text my most frequently used words here: the , off, to
and a. and then the words "Rivers" and "shell shock" which isn't much of a surprise
because the essay actually was about shell shock and shell-shocked
therapist called Rivers in collocation you can look at kinds of words that
seem to appear in close proximity
they sort of form pairs and inauthentic text this will tell you a lot about
which words are more likely to combine in a language in my example here I screened
my corpus for collocates of the word "shell shock" here it tells us how often
these collocations appear and if the collocate is to the left or to the
right of my search itenm
finally concordance in which is probably the most pleasing to OCD people because
not only does it make pretty pretty columns it allows you to see what bigger
chunks of language surround your search item in the corpus really cool so as
you see corpus analysis has lots of benefits first of all it deals with
relatively objective data and can be easily carried out with huge quantities
of texts also it's a descriptive method and that's always a plus isn't it? also working
with corpora can be really beneficial to high proficiency language learners
Not sure about the preposition you have to use after "abide"? Just look it up in a corpus
and here's a pro tip for simple things like this even Google's frequency count
can be really helpful as well so moving on corpus linguistics grants insight
into really interesting fields of linguistic such morphosyntactic
patterns processes of language change or even lexical traces of discourses and
that's it now you've got general idea of corpora
did you like the video please give it a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel
wow so when analyzing a text with concordance I could actually find traces
of discourses that's really really neat! But what's a discourse, though? Don't panic, avid viewer, I've got
you covered with the video just click here