Studies in Corpus Linguistics - Böcker

This book describes new methodological and technological approaches to corpus building and presents recent research based on the Norwegian Newspaper Corpus. This is a large monitor corpus of contemporary Norwegian language, compiled through daily harvesting of web newspapers. The book gives an overview of the corpus and its system architecture, and presents tools used for tasks such as text harvesting, annotation, topic classification and extraction and frequency profiling of new words and phrases. Among the innovative technologies is Corpuscle, a corpus query engine and management system which is flexible enough to handle very large corpora in an efficient way. The individual research contributions based on the corpus explore different aspects of Norwegian, including the occurrence of anglicisms, neologisms and terminology, and the use of metonymy and metaphor in newspaper language. The book also describes an innovative method of applying correspondence analysis and implicational analysis to investigate interdependencies between morphosyntactic variants.

This volume illustrates new trends in corpus linguistics and shows how corpus approaches can be used to investigate new datasets and emerging areas in linguistics and related fields. It addresses innovative research questions, for example how prosodic analyses can increase the accuracy of syntactic segmentation, how tolerant English language teachers are about language variation, or how natural language can be translated into corpus query language. The thematic scope encompasses four types of ‘boundary crossings’. These include the incorporation of innovative scientific methods, specifically new statistical techniques, acoustic analysis and stylistic investigations. Additionally, temporal boundaries are crossed through the use of new methods and corpora to study diachronic data. New methodologies are also explored through the analysis of prosody, variety-specific approaches, and teacher attitudes. Finally, corpus users can cross boundaries by employing a more user-friendly corpus query language.

The present volume is intended as a reference book on Wikipedia corpus studies, from corpus construction to exploration and analysis. Wikipedia is a complex object, difficult to manipulate for linguists and corpus researchers. In addition to the encyclopedic articles consulted by millions of users, it contains vast spaces of written discussions, aka talk pages, where Wikipedia authors negotiate the collaborative editing of articles, make evaluations, or discuss related topics. The proposed volume covers Wikipedia articles, their revision histories, and discussions, with a focus on discussions, which have not been studied extensively so far and have also been neglected in previous corpus building efforts. Wikipedia discussions are instances of computer-mediated communication (CMC), thus constituting a completely different, interaction-oriented linguistic genre. Sophisticated tools and methods of linguistic annotation and corpus exploration are needed to exploit the huge and valuable corpus resources that can be constructed from the Wikipedia discussions. The present volume aims at encouraging and facilitating Wikipedia corpus studies, providing standards, recommendations, and innovative methods to build and explore Wikipedia corpora, and presenting corpus studies that make the most of the peculiarities of Wikipedia.