History, Features, and Typology of Language Corpora

Description

This book discusses key issues of corpus linguistics like the definition of the corpus, primary features of a corpus, and utilization and limitations of corpora. It presents a unique classification scheme of language corpora to show how they can be studied from the perspective of genre, nature, text type, purpose, and application. A reference to parallel translation corpus is mandatory in the discussion of corpus generation, which the authors thoroughly address here, with a focus on Indian language corpora and English. Web-text corpus, a new development in corpus linguistics, is also discussed with elaborate reference to Indian web text corpora. The book also presents a short history of corpus generation and provides scenarios before and after the advent of computer-generated digital corpora. This book has several important features: it discusses many technical issues of the field in a lucid manner; contains extensive new diagrams and charts for easy comprehension; and presents discussions in simplified English to cater to the needs of non-native English readers. This is an important resource authored by academics who have many years of experience teaching and researching corpus linguistics. Its focus on Indian languages and on English corpora makes it applicable to students of graduate and postgraduate courses in applied linguistics, computational linguistics and language processing in South Asia and across countries where English is spoken as a first or second language. Front Matter ....Pages i-xxix Definition of ‘Corpus’ (Niladri Sekhar Dash, S. Arulmozi)....Pages 1-15 Features of a Corpus (Niladri Sekhar Dash, S. Arulmozi)....Pages 17-34 Genre of Text (Niladri Sekhar Dash, S. Arulmozi)....Pages 35-49 Nature of Data (Niladri Sekhar Dash, S. Arulmozi)....Pages 51-65 Type and Purpose of Text (Niladri Sekhar Dash, S. Arulmozi)....Pages 67-83 Nature of Text Application (Niladri Sekhar Dash, S. Arulmozi)....Pages 85-99 Parallel Translation Corpus (Niladri Sekhar Dash, S. Arulmozi)....Pages 101-124 Web Text Corpus (Niladri Sekhar Dash, S. Arulmozi)....Pages 125-146 Pre-digital Corpora (Part 1) (Niladri Sekhar Dash, S. Arulmozi)....Pages 147-165 Pre-digital Corpora (Part 2) (Niladri Sekhar Dash, S. Arulmozi)....Pages 167-186 Digital Text Corpora (Part 1) (Niladri Sekhar Dash, S. Arulmozi)....Pages 187-202 Digital Text Corpora (Part 2) (Niladri Sekhar Dash, S. Arulmozi)....Pages 203-219 Digital Speech Corpora (Niladri Sekhar Dash, S. Arulmozi)....Pages 221-239 Utilization of Language Corpora (Niladri Sekhar Dash, S. Arulmozi)....Pages 241-258 Limitations of Language Corpora (Niladri Sekhar Dash, S. Arulmozi)....Pages 259-272 Back Matter ....Pages 273-293