Excerpt - Chapter One. Introduction
The chapters in this book cover new research by corpus linguists, computational
linguists and linguists who use corpora. While all three groups are growing in
number, I suspect that the boundaries between them are becoming more blurred
than they used to be, and also that it is the last group which is experiencing the
most signi$ cant increase. As an illustration, in 1995, my university had a large
Linguistics and English Language department which encompassed a broad range
of fields and research methodologies. There were two corpus linguistics lecturers,
but not a great deal of overlap between their work and the other research going
on in the department. Now, in the same department, the situation has changed
remarkably, with corpora and corpus techniques being used by the majority of the
academics to various degrees. Additionally, I regularly receive requests for information
and help from researchers in other departments who have heard about
corpus-based analysis and think it would be helpful to them. This is in contrast to
the response I received ten years ago when I gave a workshop on corpus linguistics
to a very resistant group of social scientists. ‘Words are beautiful things, like flowers’,
complained one participant. ‘We should not put them inside computers!’
Perhaps the enthusiasm for corpus linguistics at my university is more an example
of what is possible, rather than what is typical, yet a look at any online book
store reveals numerous examples of published work that is not just about corpus
linguistics but the corpus approach as it relates to some other aspect of linguistics
(phonetics, language teaching, language acquisition, translation studies, discourse
analysis, stylistics, metaphor, functional linguistics, world Englishes etc.).
One aim of this book is to address some of the more recent ways that corpus-based
approaches have started to be incorporated in a range of linguistic research.
A second aim is to address some of the current trends and themes that are influencing
the manner in which corpus research is developing, as well as noting some
of the concerns that people working closely with corpora are currently facing.
Each chapter in this book follows (to a greater or lesser extent), the format of
reviewing key and current work in a particular field of linguistics (e.g. stylistics,
language teaching, critical discourse analysis), or aspect of corpus linguistics (e.g.
software design, corpus design, annotation schemes) and then providing a recent
example or case study of the author’s own research in that area. Many of the chapters
have multiple foci; for example, David Oakey considers corpus design as well
as the analysis of fixed collocational patterns, while Randi Reppen’s chapter looks
at both the American National Corpus and language teaching. Because of this, it
is difficult to divide the chapters in this book into neat subsections such as ‘corpus
building’ ‘corpus software’ and ‘corpus applications’, although I have tried to
order them in a way where it is possible to note relationships or similarities between
those that are closer together. In the remainder of this introduction, I provide a
short summary of each chapter, and end with a brief discussion of some of the
themes which emerge across the book as a whole.
Paul Baker, Lancaster University
