Corpus Linguistics: Readings in a Widening Discipline

Not that long ago, all linguistics was corpus linguistics. For much of the twentieth century, though, changes in theoretical fashion put linguists for whom collections of texts are the primary object of study at the margins of the field. Now things are shifting again, and a new generation of linguists with a wakening interest in linguistic data is returning to the field's corpus-based roots. What they are finding is that technological and methodological advances have quietly revolutionized corpus linguistics. In Corpus Linguistics: Readings in a Widening Discipline, editors Geoffrey Sampson and Diana McCarthy have put together a volume aimed at filling in some of what has happened in corpus linguistics while no one was watching. This collection of 43 reprinted papers, with original publication dates ranging from 1965 to 2002, includes a few of the usual suspects and a number of more-often-cited-than-read classics, making it an ideal source for an upper division course on corpus linguistics, or to supply what new corpus linguists (or their teachers) wish they had learned in grad school. Beyond these core contributions, however, the editors have wisely included an idiosyncratic selection of more-obscure papers guaranteed to stir the imagination of anyone with a professional interest in language. Papers on, for example, second language teaching, the discourse properties of Internet Relay Chat, and " non-indigenous minority languages " (such as South Asian languages spoken in the UK) show some of the possibilities that corpus-based methods have to offer beyond their philological foundations. While presented in chronological order, the papers in this volume for the most part fall into three classes. The largest is made up of papers on corpus design and methodology , such as Nelson Francis on the construction of the Brown corpus, Burnage and Dunlop on the British National Corpus, and B ¨ ohmová and Hajičová on the Prague Dependency Treebank. The second group are papers on the descriptive analysis of corpora. One, an excerpt from Charles Fries's The Structure of English, predates computational corpus analysis, but most of the rest are quantitative studies of English grammatical features. This group includes papers on cleft and pseudo-cleft constructions (Collins), that vs. null complementizers (Rissanen), and the use of terms of abuse (McEnery et al.). The third class of papers addresses technical issues in computational linguistics. Some of the classics in this group include Gale and Church on smoothing corpus counts, Hindle and Rooth on prepositional …