Convenors: Dr Dora Alexopoulou and Dr Akira Murakami

This course introduces corpora in linguistic research, aiming to cover general issues on using corpora as well as introduce students to software and tools. Each session consists of two parts. The first half is devoted to general issues, including the types of research questions that can be best addressed through corpora, the use of corpora in different subfields of linguistics (e.g. syntax, acquisition) the relation of corpus data with other types of data (e.g. judgments, comprehension) as well as questions of corpus design, mark-up and annotation. The second half of each session is devoted to hands-on practical work on corpus software and tools. The tools covered in the module include AntConc, Sketch Engine, a suite of corpora at corpus.byu.edu, Multidimensional Analysis Tagger, and Coh-Metrix, among others. They allow us to readily perform various kinds of analyses that are beyond the manual inspection of textual data, often with the aid of built-in part-of-speech taggers and parsers.