#corpusmooc

[mooclog]

Week 3 notes

To create the query for a research:

Create a pilot corpus with a simple query and find the keywords of this pilot corpus against a general corpus;

Intuitively decide the accuracy of the KW

In the talk, Pr McEnery uses topoi in the broad sense of ‘theme’. In critical discourse analysis it usually has a slightly different sense of ‘warrant for an argument’ rather than theme. 

[mooclog]

[mooclog]

[mooclog]

La revue Corpus est consacrée à la linguistique de corpus envisagée sous tous ses aspects : théoriques, épistémologiques, méthodologiques, quels que soient le champ disciplinaire et le domaine géolinguistique d’application. Elle développe une réflexion sur le rôle des corpus dans les pratiques linguistiques contemporaines et une analyse réflexive sur les modes de constitution des différents corpus présentés, ainsi que sur leurs outils d’exploitation. Elle tente ainsi d’expliciter et d’évaluer les processus heuristiques qui unissent la collecte et la structuration des données empiriques et le surgissement ou la validation de l’hypothèse linguistique.

[mooclog]

Notes about Week 2 videos (continued)

Video 4

Lock words: words which have remained the same over time

[mooclog]

Notes about Week 2 videos

Video 1

Sets of +/- 5 words is the most useful span for collocates

Minimum frequency threshold: 10 co-occurrences

Take into accounts sentence boundaries?

Mutual information: how often 2 words co-occurate, relative to how often they occur without one another.

Mutual information may not be very accurate with data low in terms of frequency

Other measures are available that can give different results: for example the Dice coefficient

Video 2

Colligation: a word collocates with a particular grammatical class

Semantic preference: collocation with words in a specific semantic family

Discourse prosody characterize speaker's attitude. Example of the verb 'cause' which is very often associated with negative events.

Video 3

Keyword list < comparing 2 frequency lists

Selecting the most 'key' keywords: only consider the top 10 or 50 or 100 keywords, apply a minimum frequency (for ex. a word must occur at least 20 times to be a keyword) or considering only words well distributed (e.g. in at least 20 texts of the corpus)

[bethlearnscorpuslinguistics-blog]

Using Corpus Linguistics

I considered using corpus linguistic methodology to analyse newspapers from N. Ireland but I'm not sure if this would be the best use of this course. I'm also not sure how to go about doing this yet: where to find the newspapers, how to transfer the corpus to machine-readable files etc. The practicalities of a project like this seem like a lot of work right now. 

I may instead use an existing corpus like the BNC or the Bank of English to continue my master's dissertation research on the use of 'like' as a discourse marker and quotative. This way I can take advantage of the transcribed speech files that are held within these corpora. (I wish I had known more about corpus linguistics when I doing this research this last year!)

Having begun to use AntConc as part of the Week 1 activities, I am more aware of the potential to use software to uncover larger overall trends within large amount of spoken data.

[mooclog]

Week 2 warm up activity

Defining the words diamond and cause.

Diamond: English noun. Refers to a very hard gem, mostly used for jewellery, and also in tools to cut glass. Also used for a typographic sign.

Cause: English noun, from the Latin causa. Can refer to the reason of an effect, or to a case in a legal context.