Corpus Linguistics

Corpus Linguistics is the computational analysis of real-life language use, drawing on databases of written, spoken or signed language. Corpus data reveals patterns in language that go beyond the standard assumptions of linguistic theory, and it is corpus data that forms the foundation of language technologies such as Google and AI. Students in this course will engage in hands-on workshops, learning how to use custom corpus software, as well as basic Python coding, to discover patterns in language. They will also be guided into the theoretical underpinnings of corpus linguistics – how it reflects the cognitive processing of language, and how it relates to theories of grammatical structure. This course does not assume any previous technical skills, but students must be ready to learn computational tools for exploring corpus data. Assessment will involve data exploration, presenting and discussing analyses, and written work.