Corpus Linguistics: Readings in a Widening Discipline - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0826460135 ISBN 13: 9780826460134

Publisher: Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd., 2004

Synopsis

A corpus is a collection of specimens of a language as used in real life, in writing and/or speech. Corpus lingustics is research, carried out in university linguistics departments and computing departments (and nowadays in industrial research labs too), which uses corpora as crucial sources of evidence on the structure and properties of languages. Modern corpus linguistics began fifty years ago, but the subject has seen explosive growth since the early 1990s. These days corpora are being used to advance virtually every aspect of language study, from computer processing techniques such as machine translation, to literary stylistics, social aspects of language use, and improved language-teaching methods. Because corpus linguistics has grown fast from small beginnings, newcomers to the field often find it hard to get their bearings. This volume reprints 42 corpus linguistics articles which first appeared at dates ranging from 1952 to 2002, and which between them illustrate all the main directions in which the subject is developing. It includes articles that are already recognized as classics, and others which deserve to become so, supplemented with editorial introductions relating the individual contributions to the field as a whole. Language is a perennially fascinating topic, and some contributions are chosen, among other reasons, for the human interest of their findings.

About this title

Review:

the book has been compiled with a lot of thought, covering a large number of different topic areas within corpus linguistics. and extremely valuable resource to own, not only for corpus linguists as reference, but also for those newly interested in the area to understand the wider field of corpus linguistics as well as the historical development that it has undergone. Linguist List, 16.98, 1/14/05 ...I highly recommend Corpus Linguistics: Readings in a Widening Discipline to anyone with any interest in linguistic corpora. Besides bringing students and practitioners of other branches of linguistics up to speed on advances in modern corpus linguistics, this volume may as a secondary effect help inform applied, computational, descriptive, and even theoretical linguists about each other's fields... In any event, this collection is a wonderful addition to the currently available textbooks on corpus linguistics, and provides yet another reason that, as the editors say in their introduction, 'this is a good time to bcome a corpus linguist'. Robert Malouf, San Diego State University. Compuational Linguistics --Sanford Lakoff

About the Author:

Geoffrey Sampson is Professor of Natural Language Computing at the School of Informatics, University of Sussex. Diana McCarthy is a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow, in the Department of Informatics at Sussex University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd.
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0826460135
• ISBN 13: 9780826460134
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 544
• Editor: Sampson Geoffrey, McCarthy Diana