The Changing Face of Corpus Linguistics: 55 (Language and Computers) - Hardcover

Antoinette Renouf; Andrew Kehoe

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 9042017384 ISBN 13: 9789042017382

Publisher: Brill | Rodopi, 2006

Synopsis

This volume is witness to a spirited and fruitful period in the evolution of corpus linguistics. In twenty-two articles written by established corpus linguists, members of the ICAME (International Computer Archive of Modern and Mediaeval English) association, this new volume brings the reader up to date with the cycle of activities which make up this field of study as it is today, dealing with corpus creation, language varieties, diachronic corpus study from the past to present, present-day synchronic corpus study, the web as corpus, and corpus linguistics and grammatical theory. It thus serves as a valuable guide to the state of the art for linguistic researchers, teachers and language learners of all persuasions. After over twenty years of evolution, corpus linguistics has matured, incorporating nowadays not just small, medium and large primary corpus building but also specialised and multi-dimensional secondary corpus building; not just corpus analysis, but also corpus evaluation; not just an initial application of theory, but self-reflection and a new concern with theory in the light of experience. The volume also highlights the growing emphasis on language as a changing phenomenon, both in terms of established historical study and the newer short-range diachronic study of 20th century and current English; and the growing area of overlap between these two. Another section of the volume illustrates the recent changes in the definition of 'corpus' which have come about due to the emergence of new technologies and in particular of the availability of texts on the world wide web. The volume culminates in the contributions by a group of corpus grammarians to a timely and novel discussion panel on the relationship between corpus linguistics and grammatical theory.

About this title

About the Author:

Antoinette Renouf is Research Professor in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Central England (UCE), Birmingham, and Director of the Research and Development Unit for English Studies (RDUES), a unit which has conducted empirical linguistic research since the late 80s, particularly into the relationship between surface word patterning in text and deeper meaning, and has created ground-breaking automated information retrieval systems. Her interest as a linguist is in the unique insights into language use thereby gained, in areas including word formation, lexical semantics and the changing lexicon.
Andrew Kehoe is a Research Fellow at the same university. An English language and computing graduate, he joined RDUES in 1999 as a software developer on the APRIL project, which monitored and classified new words in text across time. Since 2001, he has worked primarily on the WebCorp project, developing a suite of tools to access the World Wide Web as a corpus, and now creating a linguistically-tailored search engine to improve performance.

Synopsis:

An international conference in May 2003 in Guernsey assessed the field of corpus linguistics 20 years after it began. The 22 papers and a panel discussion report cover corpus creation, diachronic and synchronic corpus study, the World Wide Web as a corpus, and corpus linguistics and grammatical theory. Among specific topics are computing the lexico

About this edition

• Publisher: Brill | Rodopi
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 9042017384
• ISBN 13: 9789042017382
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 416