We present a practical course in corpus linguistics meant to provide students with a humanities background with the necessary knowledge and skills for an empirical study as basis for term papers, BAor MA-thesis. The course is part of a new Bachelor program and is combined with a theoretically oriented course on corpus linguistics. The challenge is to provide students with the necessary understa...

Over the past few decades, corpus linguistics has evolved into a fully-fledged methodological approach with an increasing number of scholars using various different methods. In this rather programmatic paper, I will argue, however, that corpus linguistics has, in some respects at least, still some way to go in terms of developing rigorous tools and methods and using them more often. More specif...

For over twenty years, the British National Corpus has been one of the most widely known and used corpora. It is almost impossible to attend an international corpus linguistics conference such as Corpus Linguistics, ICAME (International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English), AACL (American Association for Corpus Linguistics) or APCLC (Asia Pacific Corpus Linguistics Conference) witho...

• frequencies of occurrence of linguistic elements, which can be studied from two different perspectives: o how frequent are morphemes or words or patterns/constructions in (parts of) a corpus? This information can be provided in various different forms of frequency lists; o how evenly are morphemes or words or patterns/constructions distributed across (parts of) a corpus? This information can ...

To the extent that NLP is used by QA systems, it is mostly limited to tokenization, named entity recognition, stemming, POS tagging, and shallow parsing. More sophisticated NLP such as (deep) syntactic parsing is hardly ever used. In the present paper I investigate why this should be the case and try to establish how deep syntactic parsing as developed in the field of corpus linguistics might c...

This special issue of Linguistics and the Human Sciences offers a collection of original contributions to the study of languages in contrast from discourse, corpus, and functional perspectives. The papers were presented at the Sixth International Conference on Contrastive Linguistics, held in Berlin 29 September–3 October 2010, in the context of two panels: ‘Discourse analysis and contrastive l...