Стаття присвячена корпусним методам дослідження мовного матеріалу, сфері їх застосування, основним перевагам та недолікам. У праці представлено визначення та опис основних понять корпусної лінгвістики, а також короткий огляд історії розвитку цієї лінгвістичної течії. The paper deals with corpus studies, their methodology, sphere of application and main strengths and weaknesses. The main notions of corpus linguistics are defined and described. The paper also presents a brief outline of the corpus linguistics history and development

Koliada, Elina K.

Vetskur, Tetiana A.

Вецкур, Тетяна Антоліївна

Коляда, Еліна Калениківна

Electronic Eastern European National University Institutional Repository

УДК 811.111’33         T. A. Vetskur  
Volyn Institute for Economics and Management, Lutsk 
E. K. Koliada 
Lesya Ukrainka Eastern European National University, Lutsk 
 
CORPORA IN LINGUISTICS:  
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND APPLICATION 
 
Стаття присвячена корпусним методам дослідження мовного 
матеріалу, сфері їх застосування, основним перевагам та недолікам. У праці 
представлено визначення та опис основних понять корпусної лінгвістики, а 
також короткий огляд історії розвитку цієї лінгвістичної течії. 
Ключові слова: дані, корпус, методологія, дискурс, колокація, 
лексикографія. 
 
В статье рассматриваются корпусные методы изучения языкового 
материала, сфера их применения, основные преимущества и недостатки. В 
работе содержится определение и описание основных понятий корпусной 
лингвистики, а также краткий обзор истории развития этого 
лингвистического направления. 
Ключевые слова: данные, корпус, методология, дискурс, коллокация, 
лексикография.  
 
The paper deals with corpus studies, their methodology, sphere of application 
and main strengths and weaknesses. The main notions of corpus linguistics are 
defined and described. The paper also presents a brief outline of the corpus 
linguistics history and development. 
Key words: data, corpus, methodology, discourse, collocation, lexicography.  
 
Nowadays corpus methods are considered to be practically a universal tool for 
analyzing linguistic phenomena in various domains such as discourse analysis, 
cognitive linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics etc. The problem of 
corpus studies was investigated in great detail by D. Biber [2], G. Leech [5], 
T. McEnery [6], T. Virtanen [7] and A. Wilson [6].  Still, there remain some areas 
which require close and careful consideration. 
The present paper aims at revealing the core points of corpus studies and 
delimiting the spheres of corpora successful application. The above objective 
presupposes the following tasks:  
1) to provide definitions of the main notions used by corpus linguistics; 
2) to give some examples of its application when processing linguistic data; 
3) to indicate corpus linguistics strengths and weaknesses with proper 
validation and justification. 
 The origins of corpus studies can be traced back to the mid-18
th
 century when 
Samuel Johnson used a corpus of texts to gather authentic uses of words, which he 
then included as examples in his dictionary of English. The focus was made on the 
regulatory function of the study, not on its representative character. However, 
present-day corpus studies make a sharp contrast.  
  Geoffrey Leech believes that two pioneers of modern Corpus Linguistics are 
Randolph Quirk and Nelson Francis, and the key dates are 1959 (when Quirk 
started his Survey of English Usage) and 1962 (when Francis, aided by Henry 
Kucera, started to collect Brown Corpus) [5, p. 155]. These two scholars both hit 
on the idea of collecting a large body of texts (and transcriptions) wide-ranging 
enough to represent, to a reasonable extent, the contemporary English language. In 
this, they must have been considerably influenced by the American structuralist 
school of the 1940s and 1950s, which placed fundamental emphasis on the need 
for a corpus of any language to be investigated.  
Further on, Geoffrey Leech suggests that there are two defining goals that 
made Quirk and Francis founding fathers of modern Corpus Linguistics: 
1) someone giving an account of a language should aim at what Quirk called 
“total accountability”, i.e. all relevant data obtainable should be taken into account, 
not just the examples that the investigator finds useful or congenial; 
2) a corpus, complied in the spirit of offering total accountability, should be 
made available as a resource for the world of scholarship at large [5, p. 156].    
Among a great number of corpus definitions we consider the following to be 
the most relevant and trustworthy. T McEnery and A. Wilson state that a corpus in 
modern linguistics, in contrast to being simply any body of text, might more 
accurately be described as a finite-sized body of machine-readable text, sampled in 
order to be maximally representative of the language variety under consideration 
[6, p. 32].  
Spanish scholars stress that corpus linguistics using the computer as a tool is 
currently regarded as a methodology involving an empirical approach to language 
which started to gain importance in the 1970s [3, p. 11]. A corpus can be used as a 
source of data in syntax, lexis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and 
virtually every branch of language study [5, p. 157]. Corpora reduce the burden of 
evidence that is often placed on intuitions to show how particular grammatical and 
lexical choices are regularly made [4, p. 89]. 
The term corpus when used in the context of modern linguistics tends most 
frequently to have more specific connotations which may be considered under four 
main headings: 
- Sampling and representativeness; 
- Finite size; 
- Machine-readable form; 
- A standard reference. 
It was Chomsky’s criticism of early corpora that they would always be 
skewed: in other words, some utterances would be excluded because they are rare, 
other much more common utterances might be excluded simply by chance, and 
chance might also act so that some rare utterances were actually included in the 
corpus. Although modern computer technology means that nowadays much larger 
corpora can be collected than these Chomsky was thinking about when he made 
these criticisms, his criticism about the potential skewedness of a corpus is an 
important and valid one which must be taken seriously. However, this does not 
mean abandoning the corpus analysis enterprise. Rather, consideration of 
Chomsky’s criticism should be directed towards the establishment of ways in 
which a much less biased and more generally representative corpus may be 
constructed. 
As well as sampling, the term “corpus” also tends to imply a body of a finite 
size, for example 1,000,000 words. This is not, however, universally so. At 
Birmingham University, for example, John Sinclair’s COBUILD team have been 
engaged in the construction and analysis of a collection of texts known as a 
monitor corpus. A monitor corpus, which Sinclair’s team often prefer to call 
simply “a collection of texts” rather than a “corpus”, is an open-ended entity. Texts 
are constantly being added to it, so that it gets bigger and bigger as more samples 
are added. Monitor corpora are primarily of importance in lexicographic work, 
which is the main interest of the COBUILD group. They enable lexicographers to 
trawl a stream of new texts looking for the occurrence of new words or for 
changing meanings of old words. Their main advantages are: 
- the age of texts, which is not static and means that very new texts can be 
included, unlike the synchronic “snapshot” provided by finite corpora; 
- their scope, in that a larger and much broader sample of the language can 
be covered. 
Today, corpus-based lexicographic investigations address six major types of 
research questions. These are: 
1. What are the meanings associated with a particular word? 
2. What is the frequency of a word relative to other related words? 
3. What non-linguistic association patterns does a particular word have (e. g., 
to registers, historical periods, or dialects)? 
4. What words commonly co-occur with a particular word, and what is the 
distribution of these “collocational” sequences across registers? 
5. How are senses and uses of a word distributed? 
6. How are seemingly synonymous words used and distributed in different 
ways [2, p. 23–24]? 
Given the growing size of corpora, corpus analysis is increasingly 
quantitative, tending to focus on those features which are readily identifiable and 
countable for a computer. This generally means word-forms and their co-
occurrences with other word-forms, n-grams (i.e. recurrent multi-word sequences) 
etc. These frequency counts can then be compared with those obtained for other 
words and co-occurrences, or with those for different corpora or sub-corpora, in 
order to identify statistically significant differences. We fully agree with the 
statement of G. Aston that a major strength of corpus analysis is that such counts 
can highlight patterns which may have eluded intuition [1, p. 7]. 
Nevertheless, this kind of investigation has its shortcomings. The main 
disadvantage of corpora is that they are not such a reliable source of quantitative 
(as opposed to qualitative) data about a language as they are constantly changing in 
size and are less rigorously sampled than finite corpora. With the exception of the 
monitor corpus observed, though, it should be noted that it is more often the case 
that a corpus has a finite number of words contained in it. At the beginning of a 
corpus-building project, the research plan will set out in detail how the language 
variety is to be sampled, and how many samples of how many words are to be 
collected so that a pre-defined grand total is arrived at. 
With the Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen (LOB) corpus and the Brown corpus the 
grand total was 1,000,000 running words of text; with the British National Corpus 
(BNC) it was 100,000,000 running words. Unlike the monitor corpus, therefore, 
when such a corpus reaches the grand total of words, collection stops and the 
corpus is not thereafter increased in size. One exception to this is the London-Lund 
corpus, which was augmented in the mid-1970s by Sidney Greenbaum to cover a 
wider variety of genres.  
The definition of a corpus we use clearly states the importance of machine- 
readable feature. Though, for many years, the term “corpus” could be used only in 
reference to printed text. But now things have changed, so that this is perhaps the 
exception rather than the rule. One example of a corpus which is available in 
printed form is a Corpus of English Conversation (Starvik and Quirk 1980). This 
corpus represents the “original” London-Lund corpus (i.e. minus the additional 
examples of more formal speech added by Sidney Greenbaum in the 1970s). 
Although these texts are also available in machine-readable form within the 
London-Lund corpus, this work is notable as it is one of the very few corpora 
available in book format. The appearance of corpora in book form is likely to 
remain very rare, though the Spoken English Corpus has recently appeared in this 
format.  
There is also a limited amount of other corpus data (excluding context-free 
frequency lists and so on, prepared from corpora) which is available in other 
media. A complete key-word-in-context concordance of the LOB corpus is 
available on microfiche and, with spoken corpora, copies of the actual recordings 
are sometimes available for, amongst other things, instrumental phonetic analysis: 
this is the case with the Lancaster/IBM Spoken English Corpus, but not with the 
London-Lund corpus. 
Lexicology and lexicography are not the only domains where corpus approach 
can be successfully used.  It can also yield significant results in specific 
dimensions of discourse singled out by T.  Virtanen [7, p. 54-55]. Starting from (1) 
a “structural” dimension, present in much work on textuality, linguists can proceed 
to (2) a “content-based” dimension, typically opted for in rhetorically-oriented 
studies. The “cognitive” dimension (3) is omnipresent in studies of text and 
discourse, and it can thus be specifically foregrounded where expedient. The 
“interactional” dimension (4), originating in studies of spontaneous speech, cuts 
across much of the current discussion of discourse phenomena, highlighting the 
dynamism of discourse practices in both speech and writing. And the “socio-
cultural” dimension (5), too, demands consideration of the reflexivity of text and 
discourse.  
In the fifth dimension the focus is on situational and socio-cultural contexts in 
which people jointly engage and re-engage in social action through discourse, and 
in performances through which discourse takes shape; the concern is with ways of 
(co)-constructing such contexts and adapting to them, and of maintaining or 
altering them through discourse.  
It is obvious that these five dimensions of discourse are not all equally 
accessible to users of corpus-linguistic methods. In view of the discussion of 
context in such investigations, corpus-linguistic approaches can be expected to 
focus predominantly on the structural aspects of discourse and the various content-
based phenomena apparent in text and talk. In contrast, the interactional and socio-
cultural dimensions of discourse lend themselves less well to corpus studies 
because what is examined here is the dynamism of discourse as social action.  
Taking into consideration all of the above, we may summarize that corpus 
linguistics is broadly referred to as any linguistic framework which uses computer 
corpora as data and associated method of enquiry. It is highly relevant in 
lexicology, lexicography and some dimensions of discourse studies bent on 
quantitative analysis. The discovery of distributional patterns is the domain of 
corpus linguistics par excellence. Discourse linguists have benefited from corpus-
linguistic methods to study variation across texts and discourses, including 
variation across time in historical linguistics. The usual text classifications include 
text/discourse types, genres, registers, styles and modes, while fictionality can also 
constitute a dividing line between text categories. 
At the same time, corpus methods cannot be used in the cases when the 
context is of particular importance since corpora are the outcome of the processes 
of decontextualization and recontextualization of discourse. The corpus data are 
not the “original” or ”authentic” pieces of writing that they represent, nor they are 
studied in a communicative situation matching this of their writers or the expected 
readership.  
 
References 
1. Aston G. Applied Corpus Linguistics and the Learning Experience / G. Aston 
// Perspectives on Corpus Linguistics / ed. by V. Viana, S. Zyngier and 
G. Barnbrook. – Amsterdam : John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2011. – 
P. 1–16. 
2. Biber D. Corpus Linguistics :  Investigating Language Structure and Use / 
D. Biber, S. Conrad, R. Reppen. – Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 
2004. – 311 p. 
3. Hornero A. M. Foreword / A. M. Hornero, M. J. Luzon, S. Murillo // Corpus 
Linguistics : Application for the Study of English. – Bern : Peter Lang, 2008. 
– P. 11–22. 
4. Hyland K. A Convincing Argument : Corpus Analysis and Academic 
Persuasion / K. Hyland // Discourse in the Professions : Perspectives from 
Corpus Linguistics / ed. by U. Connor and T. A. Upton. – Amsterdam : John 
Benjamins Publishing Company, 2004. – P. 87–114. 
5. Leech G. Principles and Applications of Corpus Linguistics / G. Leech // 
Perspectives on Corpus Linguistics / ed. by V. Viana, S. Zyngier and 
G. Barnbrook. – Amsterdam : John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2011. – 
P. 155–170. 
6. McEnery T. Corpus Linguistics / T. McEnery, A. Wilson /2nd ed.  – 
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. – 247 p. 
7. Virtanen T. Discourse Linguistics Meets Corpus Linguistics : Theoretical and 
Methodological Issues in the Troubled Relationship / T. Virtaten // Corpus 
Linguistics : Refinements and Reassessments / ed. by A. Renouf and 
A. Kehoe. – Amsterdam : Editions Rodopi B.V., 2009. – P. 49–66. 
 


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