Grammar and Corpora
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23716200 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Richard Xiao (0009-0006-6426-7101, Lancaster University), Tony Mcenery (0000-0002-8425-6403, Lancaster University) |
| Year | 2013 |
| Pages | 1-6 |
| Publication date | 2013-10-18 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | CHAPTER |
| Venue | Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal1411 |
| OpenAlex | W1574978605 |
| ISBN | 9781405198431 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 10 |
The rapid development of corpus linguistics since the early 1990s has revolutionized virtually all areas of linguistic research. Research in grammar has probably been influenced most profoundly by the corpus‐based approach. It has helped to redefine what a grammar is. Indeed, corpora have had such a strong impact on recently published reference grammars of English that “even people who have never heard of a corpus are using the product of corpus‐based investigation”. Hunston summarizes the changes brought about by corpora in reference grammars and dictionaries in terms of five emphases, namely an emphasis on frequency, an emphasis on collocation and phraseology, an emphasis on variation, an emphasis on lexis in grammar, and an emphasis on authenticity. These five features illustrate the roles of corpora in grammar: enabling investigations of grammatical frequency, providing authentic examples of attested language use, facilitating research of grammatical variations in different usage contexts, and integrating lexis and grammar. In addition, as McEnery and Xiao's study of infinitival complementation of help demonstrates, non‐corpus‐based grammars are likely to contain biased descriptions that do not accord with attested language use. Hence corpora play a crucial role in achieving improved grammatical descriptions.
Collocation (remote sensing) · Corpus linguistics · Emphasis (telecommunications) · Grammar · Lexis · Linguistics · Natural language processing · Phraseology · Rule-based machine translation · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Natural Language Processing Techniques · Philosophy
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |