Intendierte Lernergebnisse
Being able to deal with corpora (i.e. large collections of texts) is an integral skill for anyone working professionally with language today. Within linguistics, corpus research is one of the most vibrant and dynamic areas of inquiry. Corpora have become widely used not only for classical linguistic questions about how grammar works or how lexis is used, but also for investigating how topics are being talked about in the public sphere.In modern usage, the term corpus usually refers to a digital text collection that is annotated with a pre-defined set of relevant features (e.g. part-of-speech, lemma, etc.). Almost all types of text can be studied with corpus methods, including newspapers, everyday conversations, language learner output, political speeches, literary works, tweets, etc.The course offers a gentle and hands-on introduction to the study of text corpora with a particular focus on discourse analysis and the potential uses of corpus tools for prospective teachers.Students will learn:1) how to access and use available online text corpora;2) how to compile and annotate their own text corpora;3) how to analyse corpora qualitatively and quantitatively;4) how to write a Proseminar paper based on a small corpus research project.
Lehrmethodik inkl. Einsatz von eLearning-Tools
In-class instruction sessionsRegular practical assignmentsReading assignmentsOnline quizzes
Inhalt/e
The course will first introduce students to a number of corpora that are available online (through Sketch Engine). Students will learn to apply various browser-based search and analysis tools. Next, students will learn how to compile and annotate their own corpus using machine-learning tools. Students will become acquainted with the various formats that different corpora are encoded in, with a particular focus on XML formats. Students will learn how to apply various methods for analysing corpus-derived data, including basic statistical testing. They will also learn how to visualize their results and present their research in the form of a short presentation.
Erwartete Vorkenntnisse
No prior knowledge is expected. All computer-related methods will be explained and practiced in a slow-paced and hands-on fashion.Laptop computers are required!
Literatur
Gillings, Mathew, Mautner, Gerlinde & Baker, Paul. (2023). Corpus-assisted discourse studies. Cambridge University Press.Gries, Stefan T. (2021). Statistics for linguistics with R: A practical introduction (Third edition). De Gruyter.Levshina, Natalia. (2015). How to do linguistics with R. Data exploration and statistical analysis. John Benjamins.McEnery, Tony & Wilson, Andrew. (2022). Corpus linguistics. Edinburgh University Press.Meyer, Charles F. (2023). English corpus linguistics: An introduction (Second edition). Cambridge University Press.Winter, Bodo. (2019). Statistics for linguists: An introduction using R. Routledge.