CORPUS LINGUISTICS

Pedagogical Grammar and Corpus Linguistics

[Name of the Institute]

Pedagogical Grammar and Corpus Linguistics

Corpus Linguistics

The corpus linguistics is not on the scene before the sixties of the last century. The corpus is a collection, principled, empirical language data, text (or text fragments), which are samples of a speech given, with a result of a symbolic value. From the beginning, corpus linguistics, such as John Sinclair's designs is strictly empirical. It is quite surprising to see how the principles of these new paradigm trainers are present at an early stage, as shown by a careful reading of the first book on the importance of corpus linguistics, François Collocation Studies. Written in the mid-sixties, it was published in 2005. We learn that the lexical items acquire a meaning, not in isolation, but only when taken in context. Their meaning depends largely on their collocate, relevant units, grammatical or lexical around them. The constitution of meaning is the result of a collocation, a sequence of words in a given context, repeating sequences that have formed over and over again in the discourse, and thus, in the corpus (Francis, Sinclair, 1994, pp. 191-195).

Corpus linguistics came originally address the need for teaching English as a foreign language. Dictionaries and their traditional, exclusive focus on the words in isolation are unable to tell their users how to use a word. Corpus linguistics is an approach that could fill the gap. It is not designed in response to self-destructive efforts of cognitive linguistics and Chomsky, to describe how the individual mind processes language, but rooted in what the British call Applied Linguistics (Applied Linguistics), which focuses its efforts on the teaching of language and the development of dictionaries. Corpus linguistics does not intend to pose as an alternative or competing paradigms that address the claim discover, model, or at least, the reality of a language faculty or faculty universal language (Widdowson, 2000, pp. 8-15).

Initially, corpus linguistics is not concerned with the interpretation of specific instances or seek to be in the hermeneutic tradition. It is designed and developed as a methodology to make discoveries about language in general, to support applied linguistics in its task. The statistical tools developed are intended to update what is common to all occurrences of a lexical item. Sophisticated statistical software can discover what other words are in co-occurrence, so significant, with the lexical item in question (the node), implying significant value they appear more (or less) frequently than distribution randomly let him wait. These are the words collocate the unit nodal, node and collocate taken together make up a collocation. The goal is to make generalizations that can be taught or included in a dictionary. The emphasis is on what is common to all instances of a lexical item (or a subset among them), or common to all instances of a larger unit as a sentence more or less fixed (Stubbs, 2001, pp. 150-61). This focus entails a synchronic perspective, just like the one based Saussure language.

Different Types of Corpora

There may be ...