Section outline

  • Allgemeines

    Alle einklappen Alle aufklappen

  • 1. Introduction

    Basic info

    time: Thursday 12:30 - 2:00 pm

    room: S131 (main faculty building, located in the back wing, accessible from the courtyard)

    structure: 45 minutes lecture + 45 minutes seminar

    Timetable

    1.         5/10     Introduction to the course, first reading assignment

    2.         12/10    History and development of language corpora (pre-electronic, 1st generation, 2nd generation)

    3.         19/10    Corpus characteristics and design (incl. annotation, lemmatization, tagging), types of corpora

    4.         26/10    Basic notions of corpus linguistics (frequency, distribution, representativeness, concordance etc.)

    5.         2/11      Corpora in grammar and diachronic studies

    6.         9/11      Corpora in lexical studies and lexicography

    7.         16/11    Corpora in contrastive linguistics and translation studies

    8.         23/11    Corpora in stylistics and literary studies

    9.         30/11    Corpora in discourse studies (MD-CADS)

    10.       7/12      Corpora in language learning and teaching (L1, L2)

    11.       14/12    Corpora in forensic linguistics

    12.       21/12    Corpora in sociolinguistics

    13.       5/1/17   Final test (additional dates upon request)

  • 2. History and development of language corpora (pre-electronic, 1st generation, 2nd generation)

    • Lecture presentation Datei
    • Reading assignment: lesson 2 Datei

      Teubert, W. (2004). Language and corpus linguistics. In Halliday, Teubert, Yallop & Čermáková, Lexicology and Corpus Linguistics, pp. 96-112.

      passage called Corpus linguistics: a different look at language

  • 3. Corpus characteristics and design (incl. annotation, lemmatization, tagging), types of corpora

  • 4. Basic notions of corpus linguistics (frequency, distribution, representativeness, concordance etc.)

    • Lecture presentation Datei
    • Reading assignment: lesson 4 Datei

      Stubbs, M. (2002). 2. Words, Phrases and Meanings: Basic Concepts. In M. Stubbs, Words and Phrases, pp 24-53. Oxford: Blackwell.

    • Reading assignment: discussion

      • What are the main concepts (not only) in phraseology that corpus linguistics might shed a new light on?
      • How can we distinguish different senses of a word?
      • Why is it important to distinguish between a word-form and a lemma in terms of collocation profiles?
      • Why is a corpus relevant for semantic research?
      • Why is it important to know about a word’s frequency?
      • What is the difference between content words and function words?
      • What is a lexical density?
      • How to decide what belongs to a core vocabulary? 

  • 5. Corpora in grammar and diachronic studies

    • Lecture presentation Datei
    • Reading assignment: lesson 5 Datei

      Römer, U. (2009). The inseparability of lexis and grammar. Corpus linguistic perspectives. In Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 7, pp 141-163.

    • Reading assignment: discussion

      •What does a corpus-based approach to grammar focus on?
      •What is an idiom principle?
      •What is a pattern in language and how can it be retrieved from a corpus?
      •What is a lexical bundle and how it differs from a collocation?
      •Why to look at grammar and lexis at the same time?
      •Are there any limitations of such an approach?

  • 6. Corpora in lexical studies and lexicography

    • Lecture presentation Datei
    • Reading assignment: lesson 6 Verzeichnis

      (A short summary + a study)

      Lindquist, H. (2009). Looking for lexis. In Corpus Lingustics and the Description of English (pp. 51-57). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

      Alsina, V. & DeCesaris, J. (2002). Bilingual lexicography, overlapping polysemy, and corpus use. In Bengt Altenberg & Sylviane Granger, Lexis in Contrast (pp. 215-229), Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

    • Reading assignment: discussion

      •What does a corpus lexicographer do to extract a meaning of a word from a corpus?
      •How is a dictionary headword usually organized?
      •How can the individual meanings of a word (or senses) be ordered in a dictionary?
      •What belongs and what does not belong to a collocation dictionary?
      •What is semantic prosody and can you think of an example in your mother tongue?
      •How can monolingual dictionaries be useful in bilingual lexicography?

  • 7. Corpora in contrastive linguistics and translation studies

    • Lecture presentation Datei
    • Reading assignment: lesson 7 Datei

      Chesterman, A. (2004). Hypotheses about Translation Universals. In Claims, Changes and Challenges in Translation Studies: Selected contributions from the EST Congress, Copenhagen 2001, pp. 1-13.

    • Reading assignment: discussion

      •What is the difference between descriptive and prescriptive claims or hypotheses?
      •What two main types of translation can we historically observe?
      •What is the difference between s-universals and t-universals?
      •How can they be tested?
      •Should „bad“ translations be included in a parallel corpus?
      •Can you think of any examples of features of translation in your native language?

  • 8. Corpora in stylistics and literary studies

    • Lecture presentation Datei
    • Reading assignment: lesson 8 Datei

      Culpeper, J. (2009). Keyness. Words, parts-of-speech and semantic categories in the character-talk of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. 14:1, 29–59.

    • Reading assignment: discussion

      •What is a keyword?
      •How can semantic tagging be useful in keyword analysis?
      •What is a style marker (according to Nils Erik Enkvist)?
      •How can keywords be extracted from a corpus?
      •Why does the choice of a reference corpus matter?
      •What is a „cut-off point“?
      •Are there more types of keywords?
      •What is „aboutness“?

  • 9. Corpora in discourse studies (MD-CADS)

    • Lecture presentation Datei
    • Reading assignment: lesson 9 Datei

      Partington, A. & Marchi, A. (2015). Using corpora in discourse analysis. In Biber, D. & R. Reppen (Eds.),  Handbook of Corpus Linguistics. (pp. 216-234). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

    • Reading assignment: discussion

      •What might be an interesting topic for CADS in your home country/culture?
      •What is forced priming?
      •How do prefabricated phrases in the White House briefings corpus differ from general spoken discourse?
      •How can the Podium influence the public picture of the White House? How can we study that?
      •How can we identify what is absent in a corpus/discourse?

  • 10. Corpora in language learning and teaching (L1, L2)

    • Lecture presentation Datei
    • Reading assignment: 10 Verzeichnis

      O’Keeffe et al. (2008): How have corpora influenced language teaching? In From Corpus to Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 21-30

      + model exercises

    • Reading assignment: discussion

      •What are the main differences between traditional textbooks and corpus-based teaching materials?
      •What does DDL stand for?
      •What are the main principles used in exploratory learning?
      •How can corpora be used in creating teaching material?
      •What are the limitations of corpus-based approach in language teaching?
      •In which areas of language teaching are corpus-based approaches and materials most widely used?
      •What corpus resources are needed to support L1 teaching? Is there any difference from L2 teaching?

  • 11. Corpora in forensic linguistics

    • Lecture presentation Datei
    • Reading assignment: 11 Verzeichnis

      Olsson, J. (2009). Word Crime: Solving Crime Through Forensic Linguistics. Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 7-10, 23-34, 41-44.

    • Reading assignment: discussion

      • What are the most common research questions in forensic linguistic?
      • How can corpus-based methods help solve a case?
      • How can we identify a piece of plagiarism?
      • Why is Derek Bentley's case still discussed in forensic linguistics?

  • 12. Corpora in sociolinguistics

    • Lecture presentation Datei
    • Reading assignment: 12 Datei

      McEnery, T., Xiao, R. & Tono, Y. (2006): Swearing in modern British English. In Corpus-Based Language Studies, Routledge, pp. 264-286.

    • Reading assignment: discussion

      •What are the most frequent methods to be used in corpus-based sociolinguistics?
      •Can you see a difference between CADS and sociolinguistics?
      •What sociolinguistic variables are usually encoded in spoken corpora?
      •How would you sample a spoken corpus of your language?
      •Is there a clear social class distinction in your country?
      •How can swearing be analyzed from a sociolinguistic perspective?
      •Is there a similarly “universal” swear word as fuck in your mother tongue?

  • 13. Final test