Using Corpus Analysis Software to Analyse Specialised Texts
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’ (Kennedy, 1998; McEnery & Wilson, 2001; O’Keeffe, A., McCarthy, M., & Carter, R. , 2007; Teubert & Cermakova, 2007)
Sources of language corpora
· Subscribe to a large corpus provider such as the British National Corpus (BNC)
· 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)
· 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.net/wordsmith/) (for monolingual corpus)
- ‘Paraconc’ (http://www.athel.com/para.html) (for multilingual corpora)
Designing a specialized corpus
Corpus size
· There are no fixed ruled; 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.
· There are limitations of ‘too small’ corpora e.g. not enough concepts, terms, or patterns under investigation.
· It is preferable to create a ‘monitor’ or ‘open’ corpus because specialized words/usage are dynamic.
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.
· Specific sections may be helpful if we are looking for words or phrase under particular content areas or want to create purposeful sub-corpora.
Number of texts
· Choices can be made between collect few texts of large size or a number of texts with smaller sizes.
· Choices can also be made between selecting texts written by one or two key writers or 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 idiosyncrasy 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 e.g. compiling spoken corpora can be time-consuming and needs special types of tagging (= giving codes to the data e.g. turn-taking paralinguistic features)
Subject and text type
· Should mainly focus on the specialized text under investigation, although this is less clear-cut in multidisciplinary subjects.
· Texts may come from different subject if the research focus is on the study of particular language features rather than term extraction.
· Text types within a specialized subject field may vary from ‘expert-to-expert’ texts to ‘expert-to-non-expert’ texts, or in other words, from technical to popular texts.
Other considerations
· Authorship: Texts written by experts in a field tend to present more reliable and authentic examples of specialized language.
· Language: Specialised texts can be stored and retrieved in the form of monolingual, comparable, or parallel corpora.
· Publication date: Texts should come from recent publications unless queries are made in relation to particular periods of time.
Sources of specialized texts
· Printed materials
· Word document
· CD-ROMs
· Texts on the Web
· Online databases
Getting started with Antconc
Download the latest version of Antconc watch YouTube tutorials fromhttp://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/antconc_index.html
1. Run the program.
2. Open Files (browse and select targeted files) or Open Dir (to select targeted folders)
3. Choose the function.
4. Clear All Tools and Files before selecting opening new files.
5. Save Output to Text File to save output e.g. concordance lines.
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