Lighthouse Unlimited

 

Corpora are unprecedented resources in the analysis of language and have become an integral part of research into the process of language acquisition. In this work, an insight is given into the wide field of corpus-based research and the application of corpora in various domains such as the design of language teaching materials, dictionary work and the study of translation. It will be demonstrated how collocations of English verbs of thinking can be extracted from the British National Corpus (BNC) using SARA, a program developed especially for accessing this corpus.

Table of Contents

0 Introduction 5

1 The corpus-based approach 8
1.1 What is a corpus? 8
1.1.1 Historical development 11
1.1.2 Why use a corpus? 12
1.1.3 Criteria in corpus compilation 14
1.1.4 Text encoding and annotation 15
1.1.5 Potential risks 16
1.2 Types of corpora 17
1.2.1 Monolingual corpora 17
1.2.2 Multilingual corpora 18
1.2.3 Learner corpora 20
1.2.4 Historical corpora 21
1.2.5 Specialised corpora 21
1.2.6 Other divisions 22
1.3 What is corpus linguistics? 24
1.3.1 Early corpus linguistics 25
1.3.2 Chomsky 26
1.3.3 The revival of corpus linguistics 27

2 Corpora in language learning and language teaching 29
2.1 The role of corpora in applied linguistics 30
2.1.1 Dictionaries and grammars 30
2.1.2 Translation 31
2.1.3 Stylistics 34
2.2 The use of corpora to develop language teaching materials 34
2.2.1 Reference publishing 36
2.2.2 Materials development 37
2.3 Further teaching-oriented corpus development 38
2.3.1 LSP corpora 38
2.3.2 Computer learner corpora 39
2.3.3 Multilingual corpora 40

3 The British National Corpus homepage 42
3.1 What's new 43
3.2 Introduction 45
3.3 Ordering the BNC 50
3.4 Using the BNC 52
3.5 SARA 54
3.6 Corpora page 57
3.7 Search the web site 57
3.8 Online service 58

4 The BNC - a user guide 60
4.1 Getting started 60
4.2 Starting SARA 61
4.2.1 The FILE menu 64
4.2.2 The EDIT menu 68
4.2.3 The TEXTS menu 68
4.2.4 The VIEW menu 69
4.2.5 The WINDOW menu 69
4.2.6 The HELP menu 70
4.2.7 The QUERY menu 71
4.3 Execution of SARA queries 72
4.4 The collocation option 73
4.4.1 Before starting 73
4.4.2 Using the collocation option 73
4.4.3 The SORT option 79

5 Theories and concepts in collocational research 82
5.1 In contextualism: Firth 82
5.2 In lexicography: Sinclair 84
5.3 Hausmann 87




6 Aspects in collocational research 89
6.1 The span 89
6.2 Calculating actual frequencies of co-occurrence 90
6.3 Calculating expected frequencies 90
6.4 Measures of significance 92
6.4.1 The z-score 92
6.4.2 The t-score 93
6.4.3 The mutual information (MI) score 93
6.4.4 Significance measures compared 94
6.5 Problems in collocational analysis 95
6.5.1 Homographs 95
6.5.2 Spelling variation 96
6.5.3 Lemmatisation 97
6.5.4 Colligation 98

7 Collocational analysis 99
7.1 to consider 102
7.2 to deliberate 104
7.3 to meditate 107
7.4 to muse 109
7.5 to ponder 111
7.6 to reflect 113
7.7 to think 115

8 Collocations in technical language - a case study 118

9 Conclusion 122

Appendix
Table of figures 125
Bibliography 127