Corpora in Applied Linguistics: introduction
A corpus is defined in terms of both its form and its purpose. It’s a collection of naturally occurring
examples of language, consisting of anything from a few sentences to a set of written texts or tape
recordings, which have been collected for linguistic studies.
Electronic corpora are usually larger than paper-based collections.
A corpus doesn’t contain new information about language, but the software offers us a new perspective
on the familiar. Most readily software packages process data from a corpus in three ways: showing
frequency, phraseology and collocation.
Frequency: The words in a corpus can be arranged in order of their frequency in that corpus. Corpora
could also be compared in term of their frequency list. The result is that grammar words are more frequent
than lexical words, f.e: the, of, to, and, a, in occupy the first six places in each corpus. The only lexical word
that occurs into the top 50 words of the General Bank of English corpus is said.
Then, there are some words that occurs more frequently according to the theme of the corpora, f.e.: in
politics occurs states, international; in science words like electron, energy. The word this occurs more
frequently in science and political lists than in the general list because it is always used to summarized what
has been said before.
In addition, the use of given words may differ according to different corpus. F.e: there are differences
between the use of must or have to, incredibly or surprisingly in different corpus like books, newspapers or
spoken English. Another example of difference in frequency is the words: man, woman, husband and wife.
(generally man occurs more frequently than woman, but wife occurs more frequently than husband
because a woman is usually related to the man she has married……..).
More sophisticated is the comparison between frequencies in different registers. These are: conversation,
fiction, news and academic. (generally, in the first and the last, present tense occurs more frequently than
past tense).
Phraseology: It is observed through concordance (concordance lines bring together many instances of
use of a word or phrase). Phraseology is used as a way to clarify differences between words, f.e.: interested
and interesting (interested is often near to in, interesting is often used before a noun), between and
through (between is generally found after nouns, through after verbs).
Collocation: it is the statistical tendency of words to co-occur, f.e.: collocates of shed include: light, tears,
blood (with whom shed is a verb), but also garden (with whom shed is a noun). Collocation indicates pairs
of lexical items or the association between a lexical word and its frequent grammatical environment.
A corpora is used: for teaching a language (it can give information about how a language works and
that may not be accessible to native speaker intuition), by students encouraged by their teachers and by
translators to see how words have been translated in the past, to establish norms of frequency and usage
and to investigate cultural attitudes expressed through language.
There are different types of corpora that depend on their purpose:
Specialized corpus: it includes texts of a particular time such as newspapers, textbooks, articles in a
particular subject, lectures, essays etc. It is used to investigate a particular type of language. Ex: Cambridge
and Nottingham corpus of discourse in English (CANCODE).
General corpus: it includes texts of many types. It may include written or spoken language or both. It is
larger than specialized corpus. Ex: Bank of English.
Comparable corpora: they are two or more corpora in different languages or varieties. They can be used by
translator and learners to identify differences and equivalences in each language.
Parallel corpora: Two or more corpora in different languages, each containing texts that have been
translated into one of the two languages to the other.
