Definitions of a corpus

The concept of carrying out research on written or spoken texts is not restricted to corpus linguistics. Indeed, individual texts are often
used for many kinds of literary and linguistic analysis - the stylistic analysis of a poem, or a conversation analysis of a tv talk show.
However, the notion of a corpus as the basis for a form of empirical linguistics is different from the examination of single texts in
several fundamental ways.
In principle, any collection of more than one text can be called a corpus, (corpus being Latin for "body", hence a corpus is any body of
text). But the term "corpus" when used in the context of modern linguistics tends most frequently to have more specific connotations
than this simple definition. The following list describes the four main characteristics of the modern corpus.

Sampling and representativeness

Finite size

Machine-readable form

A standard reference

McEnery & Wilson 2001 Corpus Linguistics

http://bowland-files.lancs.ac.uk/monkey/ihe/linguistics/corpus2/2fra1.htm [Accessed 13.04.2008]

CORPUS [13c: from Latin corpus body. The plural is usually corpora].
A collection of texts, especially if complete and self-contained: the corpus of Anglo-Saxon verse. Plural also corpuses. In linguistics
and lexicography, a body of texts, utterances, or other specimens considered more or less representative of a language, and usually
stored as an electronic database. Currently, computer corpora may store many millions of running words, whose features can be
analysed by means of tagging (the addition of identifying and classifying tags to words and other formations) and the use of
concordancing programs. Corpus linguistics studies data in any such corpus.

(The Oxford Companion to the English Language, ed. McArthur & McArthur, 1992)

A collection of linguistic data, either written texts or a transcription of recorded speech, which can be used as a starting-point of
linguistic description or as a means of verifying hypotheses about a language.

(David Crystal, A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, Blackwell, 3rd Edition, 1991)

A collection of naturally occurring language text, chosen to characterize a state or variety of a language.

(John Sinclair, Corpus Concordance, Collocation, OUP, 1991)

 After this discussion we can make a reasonable short definition of a corpus. I use the neutral word "pieces" because some corpora
still use sample methods rather than gather complete texts or transcripts of complete speech events. "Represent" is used boldly but
qualified. The primary purpose of corpora is stressed so that they are not confused with other collections of language.
A corpus is a collection of pieces of language text in electronic form, selected according to external criteria to represent, as far
as possible, a language or language variety as a source of data for linguistic research.

Sinclair, J. 2005. "Corpus and Text - Basic Principles" in Developing Linguistic Corpora: a Guide to Good Practice, ed. M. Wynne.
Oxford: Oxbow Books: 1-16. Available online from http://ahds.ac.uk/linguistic-corpora/ [Accessed 13.04.2008].

There are many ways to define a corpus but there is an increasing consensus that a corpus is a collection of (1) machine readable
(2) authentic texts (including transcripts of spoken data) which is (3) sampled to be (4) representative of a particular language or
language variety.
McEnery, Xiao & Tono 2006. Corpus-Based Language Studies

Taxonomies of corpora
By medium:
Printed (!!!)
Electronic text
Digitalised speech
Video
Mixed
By design method:
Balanced
Pyramidal
Opportunistic
By size:
Fixed size
Monitor

By language variables:
Monolingual vs. multilingual
o For multilingual: aligned vs. non-aligned
Original vs. translations
Native speaker vs. learner
Synchronic vs. diachronic
General vs. specialised
Written vs. spoken
General vs. specialised
By mark-up and annotation:
Raw (plain)
Marked-up
Annotated

Visualizing Numbers of Words

Many electronic corpora contain a million words or more. But how large is a corpus of a million words, in more familiar terms?
A one-page essay from the January 1993 issue of the New Yorker contains 965 words, and the issue contains 112 pages ... if all
pages were filled with the same amount of text, an issue would contain 108,080 words. Thus, a million words would be: 9 issues of the

New Yorker
Page 3 of English Corpus Linguistics contains 374 words, and the book contains 338 pages ... if all pages were filled with the same
amount of text, the book would contain about 126,000 words. Thus, a million words would be: 8 medium-sized books
My dissertation contains 210,241 words. Thus, a million words would be: 5 large dissertations
Various electronic corpora are composed of 2000-word text samples. How big is 2000 words? Using the above examples,
approximately ...
2 pages of the New Yorker
5 pages of English Corpus Linguistics
2 pages of my dissertation
Prof. Cathy Ball, Online material to her course on Corpora and Corpus Linguistics (no longer available online)

Corpus Linguistics: a Methodology or a Theory

Corpus linguistics is a whole system of methods and principles of how to apply corpora in language studies and
teaching/learning

There exist corpus-based and non-corpus-based studies in all branches of linguistics

Corpus-Based vs. Corpus-Driven Approach

Corpus-based approach: theories are conceived and then proofed against corpora

Corpus-based linguists tend to use annotated corpora

Corpus-driven approach: theories are drawn to explain the existing data from corpora

Corpus-driven linguists tend to use raw corpora

Main Fields of Application of Corpus Linguistics

Lexicographic and lexical studies

Grammatical studies

Register variation and genre analysis

Dialect distinction and language variety

Contrastive and translation studies

Diachronic study and language change

Language learning and teaching

Semantics

Pragmatics

Sociolinguistis

Discourse analysis

Stylistics and literary studies

Forensic linguistics

Excerpts from: Chris Brew and Marc Moens. Data-Intensive Linguistics

Chapter 2. Historical roots of Data-Intensive Linguistics
2.4 Summary
2.4.1 Key ideas
The following are the key ideas of this chapter.

Apart from anything else that they may be texts are a publicly available resource for doing science about language. Especially
true of electronic text.

There are good mathematical tools for studying codes and cyphers, and some of these are useful in linguistics. Linguistics
could be seen as a branch of telecommunications engineering, if you wanted to.

Linguists have to decide whether and how to exploit the availability of electronic textual resources.

Actually having the data can be a challenge to the cherished preconceptions of current linguistics. Arguably this is no more than
an artefact of the very recent history of linguistics.

Statistics is a general method for handling finite samples of potentially infinite (or at least unmanageably large) datasets. It applies
directly to data-intensive linguistics, addressing the central question of whether the finite samples available to us are in any
appropriate sense representative of the language as a whole. All our arguments from data to general principles of language and
language behaviour hinge on the assumptions which we make about this crucial issue.

2.4.2 Key applications

The data-intensive approach seems applicable to at least the following

Explicit models of language acquisition.

Providing raw materials for psycholinguistic simulations of language behaviour.

Focussing the efforts of linguists on topics, such as compound nouns, which matter more in real life than in current linguistic
theory

Retrieving information.

Classifying and organising texts and text collections.

Authorship attribution and forensic linguistics.

Guiding the choices made by systems which generate text that is supposed to be easy to understand.

Speech recognition and adaptive user interfaces

Authoring aids and translation aids

Cryptography and computer security

It is clear that that the last three applications are the ones with the most immediate commercial potential, and that the significance of
cryptographic work in affecting our history has already been very great.

Corpus Design

Corpora of dead languages and highly specialized sublanguages:

o Exhaustive
o Finite size
o Representativeness is not an issue

Corpora of living languages:

o Non-exhaustive
o Predefined size or non-finite (monitoring)
o Representativeness is an issue
o Sampling is unavoidable
o Balance and sampling are to be considered to ensure representativeness

Representativeness refers to the extent to which a sample includes the full range of variability in a population. (Biber
1993:243)

The term population means here language or language variety. The representativeness of a (general) corpus depends on two factors:

Balance or the range of genres and registers included in the corpus

Sampling techniques or how the text excerpts for each genre are selected

Some aspects of the representativeness:

The criteria used to select the texts for a certain corpus have to be external (non-linguistic). One of the main uses of corpora is
to examine naturally occurring linguistic feature distributions. The results of corpus analyses can be used to improve its
representativeness and to discover design lapses and errors

Change over time is an issue for monitoring and diachronic corpora that are used to model the dynamic of a language
development

For corpora that are used for static language modelling change over time is not an issue and they remain representative for the
period chosen while designing the corpus.

The intended uses are very important for corpora design. They determine the target population (e.g., language(s), language variety,
genre, register, etc.). Thus, the criteria for representativeness of general and specialized corpora are different:

Broad range of genres is essential for general corpora

Closure (saturation) at lexical level is essential for specialized corpora

Production and reception are important aspects of language usage and have to be balanced in a corpus.
Sampling:

Sampling unit, e.g. a book, periodical or newspaper

Sampling frame the list of sampling units, e.g., catalogues or bibliographies

Sampling techniques, e.g., simple random sampling, stratified random sampling (proportionality is an issue by stratified
sampling)

Sample size full text vs. text chunks

http://bowland-files.lancs.ac.uk/monkey/ihe/linguistics/contents.htm
http://www.corpus-linguistics.com/
http://www.ahds.ac.uk/creating/guides/linguistic-corpora/index.htm
http://corpus.byu.edu/
http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~cbrew/2007/spring/684.02/dilbook.pdf