Corpus-Based Language Analysis

An investigation into the way people use language in speech and writing, this book introduces the corpus-based approach. This book illustrates the kinds of analyses and perspectives on language use possible from both corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches. Corpus linguistics is the study of language as expressed in corpora (samples) of “real world” text. The text-corpus method is a digestive approach for deriving a set of abstract rules, from a text, for governing a natural language, and how that language relates to and with another language; originally derived manually, corpora now are automatically derived from the source texts. Corpus linguistics proposes that reliable language analysis is more feasible with corpora collected in the field, in their natural contexts, and with minimal experimental-interference.