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What is Corpus Linguistics?

April 26, 2017Corpus Education EFL ELT English ESL Linguistics TEFL Tesl TESOL

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What is Corpus Linguistics?

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In order to conduct a study of language which is corpus-based, it is necessary to gain access to a corpus and a concordancing program. A corpus consists of a databank of natural texts, compiled from writing and/or a transcription of recorded speech. A concordancer is a software program which analyzes corpora and lists the results. The main focus of corpus linguistics is to discover patterns of authentic language use through analysis of actual usage. The aim of a corpus based analysis is not to generate theories of what is possible in the language, such as Chomsky’s phrase structure grammar which can generate an infinite number of sentences but which does not account for the probable choices that speakers actually make. Corpus linguistics only concern is the usage patterns of the empirical data and what that reveals to us about language behavior.