Corpora in Applied Linguistics

by Jesse Egbert (Editor), Paul Baker (Editor)
This book builds on Baker and Egbert’s previous work on triangulating methodological approaches in corpus linguistics and takes triangulation one step further to highlight its broader applicability when implemented with other linguistic research methods

This book discusses key issues of corpus linguistics like the definition of the corpus, primary features of a corpus, and utilization and limitations of corpora. It presents a unique classification scheme of language corpora to show how they can be studied from the perspective of genre, nature, text type, purpose, and application.

This book discusses key issues of corpus linguistics like the definition of the corpus, primary features of a corpus, and utilization and limitations of corpora. It presents a unique classification scheme of language corpora to show how they can be studied from the perspective of genre, nature, text type, purpose, and application. A reference to parallel translation corpus is mandatory in the discussion of corpus generation, which the authors thoroughly address here, with a focus on Indian language corpora and English. Web-text corpus, a new development in corpus linguistics, is also discussed with elaborate reference to Indian web text corpora. The book also presents a short history of corpus generation and provides scenarios before and after the advent of computer-generated digital corpora.

The book features recent attempts to construct corpora for specific purposes – e.g. multifactorial Dutch (parallel), Geasy Easy Language Corpus (intralingual), HK LegCo interpreting corpus – and showcases sophisticated and innovative corpus analysis methods. It proposes new approaches to address classical themes – i.e. translation pedagogy, translation norms and equivalence, principles of translation – and brings interdisciplinary perspectives – e.g. contrastive linguistics, cognition and metaphor studies – to cast new light.