Editing Corpus linguistics

{{short description|Branch of linguistics that studies language through examples contained in real texts}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=October 2021}}
'''Corpus linguistics''' is an empirical method for the [[study of language]] by way of a [[text corpus]] (plural ''corpora'').<ref name=":0">{{Cite book |last=Meyer |first=Charles F. |title=English Corpus Linguistics |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=2023 |edition=2nd |location=Cambridge |pages=4}}</ref> Corpora are balanced, often stratified collections of authentic, "real world", text of speech or writing that aim to represent a given [[linguistic variety]].<ref name=":0" /> Today, corpora are generally machine-readable data collections. 

Corpus linguistics proposes that a reliable analysis of a language is more feasible with corpora collected in the field—the natural context ("realia") of that language—with minimal experimental interference. Large collections of text, though corpora may also be small in terms of running words, allow linguists to run quantitative analyses on linguistic concepts that may be difficult to test in a qualitative manner.<ref>{{Citation |last=Hunston |first=S. |title=Corpus Linguistics |date=2006-01-01 |url=https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B0080448542009445 |encyclopedia=Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (Second Edition) |pages=234–248 |editor-last=Brown |editor-first=Keith |access-date=2023-10-31 |place=Oxford |publisher=Elsevier |doi=10.1016/b0-08-044854-2/00944-5 |isbn=978-0-08-044854-1|url-access=subscription }}</ref>

The text-corpus method uses the body of texts in any natural language to derive the set of abstract rules which govern that language. Those results can be used to explore the relationships between that subject language and other languages which have undergone a similar analysis. The first such corpora were manually derived from source texts, but now that work is automated.

Corpora have not only been used for linguistics research, they have been increasingly used to compile [[dictionaries]] (starting with ''[[The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language]]'' in 1969) and reference grammars, with ''[[A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language]]'', published in 1985, as a first.

Experts in the field have differing views about the annotation of a corpus. These views range from [[John McHardy Sinclair]], who advocates minimal annotation so texts speak for themselves,<ref>Sinclair, J. 'The automatic analysis of corpora', in Svartvik, J. (ed.) ''Directions in Corpus Linguistics (Proceedings of Nobel Symposium 82)''. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 1992.</ref> to the [[Survey of English Usage]] team ([[University College, London|University College]], London), who advocate annotation as allowing greater linguistic understanding through rigorous recording.<ref>Wallis, S. 'Annotation, Retrieval and Experimentation', in Meurman-Solin, A. & Nurmi, A.A. (ed.) Annotating Variation and Change. Helsinki: Varieng, [University of Helsinki]. 2007. [http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/journal/volumes/01/wallis e-Published]</ref>

== History ==
{{Linguistics}}
Some of the earliest efforts at grammatical description were based at least in part on corpora of particular religious or cultural significance.  For example, [[Pratisakhya|Prātiśākhya]] literature described the sound patterns of [[Sanskrit]] as found in the [[Vedas]], and 
[[Pāṇini]]'s grammar of [[classical Sanskrit]] was based at least in part on analysis of that same corpus.  Similarly, the early [[Arabic grammar#History|Arabic grammarians]] paid particular attention to the language of the [[Quran]].  In the Western European tradition, scholars prepared [[Bible concordance|concordances]] to allow detailed study of the language of the Bible and other canonical texts.

=== English corpora ===

A landmark in modern corpus linguistics was the publication of ''Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English'' in 1967. Written by [[Henry Kučera]] and [[W. Nelson Francis]], the work was based on an analysis of the [[Brown Corpus]], which is a structured and balanced corpus of one million words of American English from the year 1961. The corpus comprises 2000 text samples, from a variety of genres.<ref>{{cite book | last1=Francis | first1=W. Nelson | last2=Kučera | first2=Henry | title=Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English | publisher=Brown University Press | date=1 June 1967 | location=Providence | isbn= 978-0870571053}}</ref> The Brown Corpus was the first computerized corpus designed for linguistic research.<ref>{{Citation |last=Kennedy |first=G. |title=Corpus Linguistics |date=2001-01-01 |url=https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B0080430767030564 |encyclopedia=International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences |pages=2816–2820 |editor-last=Smelser |editor-first=Neil J. |access-date=2023-10-31 |place=Oxford |publisher=Pergamon |isbn=978-0-08-043076-8 |editor2-last=Baltes |editor2-first=Paul B.}}</ref> Kučera and Francis subjected the Brown Corpus to a variety of computational analyses and then combined elements of linguistics, language teaching, [[psychology]], statistics, and sociology to create a rich and variegated opus. A further key publication was [[Randolph Quirk]]'s "Towards a description of English Usage" in 1960<ref>{{cite journal | last1=Quirk | first1= Randolph | title=Towards a description of English Usage | journal=Transactions of the Philological Society | date=November 1960 |  pages=40–61 | volume=59 | issue=1| doi= 10.1111/j.1467-968X.1960.tb00308.x }}</ref> in which he introduced [[Survey of English Usage|the Survey of English Usage]]. Quirk's corpus was the first modern corpus to be built with the purpose of representing the whole language.<ref>{{Citation |last=Kennedy |first=G. |title=Corpus Linguistics |date=2001-01-01 |url=https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B0080430767030564 |encyclopedia=International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences |pages=2816–2820 |editor-last=Smelser |editor-first=Neil J. |access-date=2023-10-31 |place=Oxford |publisher=Pergamon |doi=10.1016/b0-08-043076-7/03056-4 |isbn=978-0-08-043076-8 |editor2-last=Baltes |editor2-first=Paul B.|url-access=subscription }}</ref>

Shortly thereafter, Boston publisher [[Houghton-Mifflin]] approached Kučera to supply a million-word, three-line citation base for its new ''[[The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language|American Heritage Dictionary]]'', the first [[dictionary]] compiled using corpus linguistics. The ''AHD'' took the innovative step of combining prescriptive elements (how language ''should'' be used) with descriptive information (how it actually ''is'' used).

Other publishers followed suit. The British publisher Collins' [[COBUILD]] [[monolingual learner's dictionary]], designed for users learning [[English language learning and teaching|English as a foreign language]], was compiled using the [[Bank of English]]. The [[Survey of English Usage]] Corpus was used in the development of one of the most important Corpus-based Grammars, which was written by Quirk ''et al.'' and published in 1985 as ''A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language''.<ref>{{cite book | last1=Quirk | first1=Randolph | last2=Greenbaum | first2=Sidney | last3=Leech | first3=Geoffrey | last4=Svartvik | first4=Jan | title=A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language | publisher=Longman | location=London | date=1985 | isbn=978-0582517349}}</ref>

The [[Brown Corpus]] has also spawned a number of similarly structured corpora: the [[LOB Corpus]] (1960s [[British English]]), Kolhapur ([[Indian English]]), Wellington ([[New Zealand English]]), Australian Corpus of English ([[Australian English]]), the Frown Corpus (early 1990s [[American English]]), and the FLOB Corpus (1990s British English). Other corpora represent many languages, varieties and modes, and include the [[International Corpus of English]], and the [[British National Corpus]], a 100 million word collection of a range of spoken and written texts, created in the 1990s by a consortium of publishers, universities ([[Oxford University|Oxford]] and [[Lancaster University|Lancaster]]) and the [[British Library]]. For contemporary American English, work has stalled on the [[American National Corpus]], but the 400+ million word [[Corpus of Contemporary American English]] (1990–present) is now available through a web interface.

The first computerized corpus of transcribed spoken language was constructed in 1971 by the Montreal French Project,<ref>{{cite journal | last1=Sankoff | first1=David | last2=Sankoff | first2=Gillian | title=Sample survey methods and computer-assisted analysis in the study of grammatical variation | journal=Canadian Languages in Their Social Context | location=Edmonton | publisher=Linguistic Research Incorporated | date=1973 | pages=7–63 | editor-last=Darnell | editor-first=R.}}</ref> containing one million words, which inspired [[Shana Poplack]]'s much larger corpus of spoken French in the Ottawa-Hull area.<ref>{{cite journal | last1=Poplack | first1=Shana | title=The care and handling of a mega-corpus | editor-first1=R. | editor-last1=Fasold | editor-first2=D. | editor-last2=Schiffrin | journal=Language Change and Variation | series=Current Issues in Linguistic Theory | location=Amsterdam | publisher=Benjamins | date=1989 | volume=52 |pages=411–451| doi=10.1075/cilt.52.25pop | isbn=978-90-272-3546-6 }}</ref>

=== Multilingual corpora ===

In the 1990s, many of the notable early successes on statistical methods in natural-language programming (NLP) occurred in the field of [[machine translation]], due especially to work at IBM Research.  These systems were able to take advantage of existing multilingual [[text corpus|textual corpora]] that had been produced by the [[Parliament of Canada]] and the [[European Union]] as a result of laws calling for the translation of all governmental proceedings into all official languages of the corresponding systems of government.

There are corpora in non-European languages as well. For example, the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics in Japan has built a number of corpora of spoken and written Japanese. [[Sign language]] corpora have also been created using video data.<ref>{{Cite web |title=National Center for Sign Language and Gesture Resources at B.U. |url=https://www.bu.edu/asllrp/cslgr/ |access-date=2023-10-31 |website=www.bu.edu}}</ref>

=== Ancient languages corpora ===

Besides these corpora of living languages, computerized corpora have also been made of collections of texts in ancient languages. An example is the [[Francis Andersen|Andersen]]-Forbes database of the Hebrew Bible, developed since the 1970s, in which every clause is parsed using graphs representing up to seven levels of syntax, and every segment tagged with seven fields of information.<ref>
{{Citation
 | last1 =Andersen
 | first1 =Francis I.
 | last2 =Forbes
 | first2 =A. Dean
 | year =2003
 | title =Hebrew Grammar Visualized: I. Syntax
 | periodical =Ancient Near Eastern Studies
 | volume =40
 | pages =43–61 [45]
}}</ref><ref>{{Citation | last =Eyland| first =E. Ann| year =1987  | contribution =Revelations from Word Counts | editor-last =Newing | editor-first =Edward G. | editor2-last =Conrad | editor2-first =Edgar W. | title =Perspectives on Language and Text: Essays and Poems in Honor of Francis I. Andersen's Sixtieth Birthday, July 28, 1985 | location =Winona Lake, IN | publisher =[[Eisenbrauns]] | page =51 | isbn =0-931464-26-9 }}</ref> The [[Quranic Arabic Corpus]] is an annotated corpus for the Classical Arabic language of the [[Quran]]. This is a recent project with multiple layers of annotation including morphological segmentation, [[part-of-speech tagging]], and syntactic analysis using dependency grammar.<ref>Dukes, K., Atwell, E. and Habash, N. 'Supervised Collaboration for Syntactic Annotation of Quranic Arabic'. ''Language Resources and Evaluation Journal''. 2011.</ref> The Digital Corpus of Sanskrit (DCS) is a "Sandhi-split corpus of Sanskrit texts with full morphological and lexical analysis... designed for text-historical research in Sanskrit linguistics and philology."<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.sanskrit-linguistics.org/dcs/#:~:text=The%20Digital%20Corpus%20of%20Sanskrit,in%20Sanskrit%20linguistics%20and%20philology. |title=Digital Corpus of Sanskrit (DCS) |access-date=2022-06-28}}</ref>

=== Corpora from specific fields ===

Besides pure linguistic inquiry, researchers had begun to apply corpus linguistics to other academic and professional fields, such as the emerging sub-discipline of [[Law and Corpus Linguistics]], which seeks to understand legal texts using corpus data and tools. The [[DBLP]] Discovery Dataset concentrates on [[computer science]], containing relevant computer science publications with sentient metadata such as author affiliations, citations, or study fields.<ref>{{Cite journal |last1=Wahle |first1=Jan Philip |last2=Ruas |first2=Terry |last3=Mohammad |first3=Saif |last4=Gipp |first4=Bela |date=2022 |title=D3: A Massive Dataset of Scholarly Metadata for Analyzing the State of Computer Science Research |url=https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.283 |journal=Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference |location=Marseille, France |publisher=European Language Resources Association |pages=2642–2651|arxiv=2204.13384 }}</ref> A more focused dataset was introduced by NLP Scholar, a combination of papers of the [[ACL Anthology]] and [[Google Scholar]] metadata.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Mohammad |first=Saif M. |date=2020 |title=NLP Scholar: A Dataset for Examining the State of NLP Research |url=https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.109 |journal=Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference |language=English |location=Marseille, France |publisher=European Language Resources Association |pages=868–877 |isbn=979-10-95546-34-4}}</ref> Corpora can also aid in translation efforts<ref>{{Citation |last=Bernardini |first=S. |title=Machine Readable Corpora |date=2006-01-01 |url=https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B0080448542004764 |encyclopedia=Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (Second Edition) |pages=358–375 |editor-last=Brown |editor-first=Keith |access-date=2023-10-31 |place=Oxford |publisher=Elsevier |doi=10.1016/b0-08-044854-2/00476-4 |isbn=978-0-08-044854-1|url-access=subscription }}</ref> or in teaching foreign languages.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Mainz |first=Johannes Gutenberg-Universität |title=Corpus Linguistics {{!}} ENGLISH LINGUISTICS |url=https://www.english-linguistics.uni-mainz.de/corpus-linguistics/ |access-date=2023-10-31 |website=Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz |language=de-DE}}</ref>

== Methods ==
Corpus linguistics has generated a number of research methods, which attempt to trace a path from data to theory. Wallis and Nelson (2001)<ref>Wallis, S. and Nelson G. ''Knowledge discovery in grammatically analysed corpora''. ''Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery'', '''5''': 307–340. 2001.</ref> first introduced what they called the 3A perspective:  Annotation, Abstraction and Analysis.

* '''Annotation''' consists of the application of a scheme to texts. Annotations may include structural markup, [[Lexical category|part-of-speech]] tagging, [[parsing]], and numerous other representations.
* '''Abstraction''' consists of the translation (mapping) of terms in the scheme to terms in a theoretically motivated model or dataset. Abstraction typically includes linguist-directed search but may include e.g., rule-learning for parsers.
* '''Analysis''' consists of statistically probing, manipulating and generalising from the dataset. Analysis might include statistical evaluations, optimisation of rule-bases or knowledge discovery methods.

Most lexical corpora today are part-of-speech-tagged (POS-tagged). However even corpus linguists who work with 'unannotated plain text' inevitably apply some method to isolate salient terms. In such situations annotation and abstraction are combined in a lexical search.

The advantage of publishing an annotated corpus is that other users can then perform experiments on the corpus (through [[corpus manager]]s). Linguists with other interests and differing perspectives than the originators' can exploit this work. By sharing data, corpus linguists are able to treat the corpus as a locus of linguistic debate and further study.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Triangulating Methodological Approaches in Corpus-Linguistic Research|publisher=Routledge|year=2016|editor-last=Baker|editor-first=Paul|location=New York|editor-last2=Egbert|editor-first2=Jesse}}</ref>

==See also==
{{Portal|Linguistics}}
* ''[[A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English]]''
* [[Collocation]]
* [[Collostructional analysis]]
* [[Concordance (publishing)|Concordance]] ([[Key Word in Context]])
* [[Keyword (linguistics)]]
* [[Linguistic Data Consortium]]
* [[List of text corpora]]
* [[Machine translation]]
* [[Natural Language Toolkit]]
* [[Pattern grammar]]
* [[Search engines]]: they access the "web corpus"
* [[Semantic prosody]]
* [[Speech corpus]]
* [[Text corpus]]
* [[Translation memory]]
* [[Treebank]]
* [[Word list]]

== Notes and references ==
{{Reflist}}

==Further reading==
===Books===
* Biber, D., Conrad, S., Reppen R. ''Corpus Linguistics, Investigating Language Structure and Use'', Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. {{ISBN|0-521-49957-7}}
* McCarthy, D., and Sampson G. ''Corpus Linguistics: Readings in a Widening Discipline'', Continuum, 2005. {{ISBN|0-8264-8803-X}}
* Facchinetti, R. ''Theoretical Description and Practical Applications of Linguistic Corpora''. Verona: QuiEdit, 2007 {{ISBN|978-88-89480-37-3}}
* Facchinetti, R. (ed.) ''Corpus Linguistics 25 Years on''. New York/Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007 {{ISBN|978-90-420-2195-2}}
* Facchinetti, R. and Rissanen M. (eds.) ''Corpus-based Studies of Diachronic English''. Bern: Peter Lang, 2006 {{ISBN|3-03910-851-4}}
* Lenders, W. ''Computational lexicography and corpus linguistics until ca. 1970/1980'', in: Gouws, R. H., Heid, U., Schweickard, W., Wiegand, H. E. (eds.) ''Dictionaries – An International Encyclopedia of Lexicography. Supplementary Volume: Recent Developments with Focus on Electronic and Computational Lexicography''. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2013 {{ISBN|978-3112146651}}
* Fuß, Eric et al. (Eds.): ''Grammar and Corpora 2016'', Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing, 2018. {{doi| 10.17885/heiup.361.509}} ([https://heiup.uni-heidelberg.de/catalog/book/361?lang=en digital open access]).
* Stefanowitsch A. 2020. ''Corpus linguistics: A guide to the methodology''. Berlin: Language Science Press. {{ISBN|978-3-96110-225-9}}, {{doi|10.5281/zenodo.3735822}}  Open Access https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/148.

===Book series===
Book series in this field include:
* [[Language and Computers]] (Brill)
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20070221063805/http://www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/t_seriesview.cgi?series=SCL Studies in Corpus Linguistics (John Benjamins)]
* [https://www.peterlang.com/view/serial/ECL English Corpus Linguistics (Peter Lang)]
*  [https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/series/corpus-and-discourse/ Corpus and Discourse (Bloomsbury)]

===Journals===
There are several international peer-reviewed journals dedicated to corpus linguistics, for example:
* [[Corpora (journal)|Corpora]]
* [[Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory (journal)|Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory]]
* [http://icame.uib.no/journal.html ICAME Journal]
* [[International Journal of Corpus Linguistics]]
* [https://www.springer.com/journal/10579 Language Resources and Evaluation Journal], supported by the [http://www.elra.info/en European Language Resources Association]
* [https://ricl.aelinco.es/index.php/ricl Research in Corpus Linguistics], supported by the Spanish Association for Corpus Linguistics (AELINCO)

==External links==
{{commons category}}

* [http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English]

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