Using corpus analysis software to analyse specialised texts

Using corpus analysis software to analyse specialised texts

     1. What is a corpus? in corpus linguistics, a corpus (sometimes used in the plural form "corpora') can be generally defined as... a collection of naturally-occurring texts in a computer-readable format which can be retrieved and analyzed using corpus analysis software'

 2. Sources of language corpora

Subscribe to a large corpus provider such as the British National Corpus (BNC)

http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/

Use web concordancing

http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk/protected/query.html/(general corpus; English) http://corpus.byu.edu/ (general corpus, American/British English) http://lextutor.ca/conc/eng/ (general and specialized corpora; English) http://www.arts.chula.ac.th/~ling/TNCII/  (general corpus; Thai) - http://www.arts.chula.ac.th/~ling/ParaConc/ (English-Thai parallel concordance)

compile own corpora and analyse data using corpus analysis software  

Antconc'( http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/software.html/ ) (for monolingual corpus)

‘Wordsmith' ( http://www.lexically.networdsmith/ ) (for monolingual corpus) "Paraconc' ( http://www.athel.com/para.html ) for multilingual corpora.

3.Designing a specialised corpus

Corpus size

- There are no fixed rules; depending on research purposes, availability of data and time. 

-Large, general corpora may be less useful than small, focused corpora if searches are made on context-specific terms.

Text extracts vs full texts

-Depends on the aim of corpus compilation.

-Whole text offers more coverage because words or terms to be looked at may be randomly distributed throughout the text.

Number of texts

-Choices can be made between collect few texts of large size or a number of texts with smaller sizes.

-writers Choices can also be made between selecting texts written by one or two key sources, or texts retrieved from different sources or written by different authors.

- Depends on your research focus e.g. to study overall language use or to study idiosync or linguistic choices preferred by particular writers.

Medium

-Can be spoken or written texts or mixed.

-Depends on research questions.

-Some practical factors should also be considered.

Subject and text type

-Should mainly focus on the specialised text under investigation, although this is less clear cut in multidisciplinary subjects.

-Texts may come from different subjects if the research focus is on the study of particular language features rather than term extraction.

-Text types within a specialised subject field may vary from 'expert-to-expert texts 'expert-to-non-expert' texts.

Other considerations

-Authorship

-Language

-Publication date

            4.Sources of specialised texts

-Printed materials software.

-word document texts CD-ROMs

-Texts on the Web

-Online databases

            5. Getting started with Antconc

-Download the latest version of Antconc and watch YouTube tutorials from http://www.antlab.Sci.waseda.ac.jplantconc_index.html

-Creating a specialized corpus profile.

- Doing small-scaled research on your own specialized corpora. Using corpora to do research in ESP.