Teaching & Learning Guide for

Author's Introduction Linguistics has drawn on the large quantities of authentic data contained in language corpora for several decades now. While debates continue regarding the nature and interpretation of such data, it is generally accepted that corpus methodologies offer a valuable perspective on language, one that complements the introspective and elicited data used in different sub‐fields of linguistics. Increasingly, language corpora can be searched or downloaded over the Internet, and are now therefore very readily accessible. Many also include demographic or textual metadata that make them invaluable as data for sociolinguistics. While existing corpora may have some drawbacks (e.g. where the corpus design is not ideally suited to the study in hand, or available corpora do not have appropriate mark‐up), they offer great savings in time and effort compared to creating a new corpus. Moreover, especially given the increasing availability of spoken texts in corpora, they constitute excellent resources for students of different levels, for teachers looking for a quick way to demonstrate a feature of language, and for researchers testing linguistic hypotheses. Author Recommends 1. Wynne, Martin. (ed.) 2005. Developing linguistic corpora: a guide to good practice . Oxford: Oxbow Books. Available online from http://ahds.ac.uk/linguistic‐corpora/ . This AHDS Guide to Good Practice gives an up‐to‐date overview of many of the issues involved in creating corpora, and is essential reading for corpus users as well as for corpus creators, whether on a large or small scale. 2. Adolphs, Svenja. 2006. Introducing electronic text analysis . London and New York: Routledge. This introduction takes a very practical approach to the investigation of both literary and non‐literary texts using computers, and I recommend it highly for beginners, such as undergraduates in linguistics or humanities computing. Routledge's companion website contains links to online corpora and analysis software that encourage readers to carry out their own studies inspired by the many examples in the book. 3. McEnery, Tony, Richard Xiao, and Yukio Tono. 2006. Corpus‐based language studies: an advanced resource book . London and New York: Routledge. This is a really excellent book, which gives a very broad overview of what corpus linguistics is, how corpora can be used, and the research that has been done on corpora in the past. In common with the other books in the Routledge Applied Linguistics series, it is structured around ‘Introduction’, ‘Extension’ and ‘Exploration’ sections of 6–10 units each, which combine detailed discussion, extracts from key readings in the field, and tasks for students. 4. Tagliamonte, Sali A. 2006. Analysing sociolinguistic variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tagliamonte has created and worked with a number of corpora of English, and treats corpora here as one source of data that can be combined with various others (such as sociolinguistic interviews and elicited data) to carry out in‐depth sociolinguistic analysis. This book makes an excellent introduction to sociolinguistic methods for advanced undergraduates, and postgraduates. 5. O’Keeffe, Anne, Michael McCarthy, and Ronald Carter. 2007. From corpus to classroom: language use and language teaching . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This textbook draws primarily on the Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English (CANCODE) and the Cambridge International Corpus. It demonstrates, through enthusiastic discussion and many examples, how corpus data can inform language teaching. 6. Sampson, Geoffrey, and Diana McCarthy. (eds). 2004. Corpus linguistics: readings in a widening discipline. London and New York: Continuum. This is a collection of 42 key research articles from half a century of corpus linguistics, and touches on the field from almost every possible angle. Sociolinguists will certainly find several threads to interest them, but the real strength of this book is in the convenience of having articles by so many of the most influential corpus researchers and theorists together in one volume. I recommend it highly to anyone intending to become seriously involved with corpora. 7. Biber, Douglas, Susan Conrad, and Randi Reppen. 1998. Corpus linguistics: investigating language structure and use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This a very useful introductory book, with a strong focus on investigating varieties and variation. A series of methodology boxes at the end of the book sets out important concepts such as concordancing, tagging, and statistical measures used in corpus linguistics. 8. Beal, Joan C., Karen P. Corrigan, and Hermann L. Moisl. (eds). 2007. Creating and digitizing language corpora. Volume 1: synchronic databases, Volume 2: diachronic databases . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. These two volumes bring together papers delivered at a workshop held in Newcastle in 2004, along with additional invited contributions. Both the synchronic volume and the diachronic volume contain descriptions of corpus work relevant to sociolinguists, and together give a detailed overview of the diverse work underway on what the editors call ‘unconventional’ language data, which encompass dialect material and child language among other types. The focus is largely on Europe and the USA, but extends far beyond corpora of English. 9. Sinclair, John. 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation . Oxford: Oxford University Press. A classic text in corpus linguistics, which gives the reader a good understanding of not just how to do corpus linguistics but also why . Technology has of course moved on since this book was written, and corpora look quite different now, but the basic principles have changed little. Also recommended are John Sinclair's other works, including Trust the Text: Language, Corpus and Discourse (Routledge, 2004) and, for developing interpretative skills, Reading Concordances (Longman, 2003). 10. McEnery, Tony. 2005. Swearing in English: Bad Language, Purity and Power from 1586 to the Present . London and New York: Routledge. Naturally the subject matter here is relatively narrow, but this book is a classic demonstration of how corpus methodology can contribute to an in‐depth study of a language phenomenon. Swearing and bad language are closely correlated with social context. The principal data drawn on here by McEnery is the spoken component of the British National Corpus

Applied linguistics · Corpus linguistics · Linguistics · Sociology · Computer Science · Lexicography and Language Studies · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity · Philosophy · Psychology