Corpus Studies

obligatory courses

Computer literacy

Communicative level of English (some reading in English required)

Remote learning

The objective of the course is to present the specificity of corpus studies and to train practical skills at designing and analysing language corpora for the purposes of studies into communication and social discourses.

The curriculum covers an introduction to corpus linguistics and its problems; discussion of main research trends and representative case studies on the example of press, political and legal discourse; practical classes on the design and building of corpora for research purposes; development of corpus analysis skills with the use of software and interpretation of quantitative data to assess social phenomena.

The objective of the course is to present the specificity of corpus studies and to train practical skills at designing and analysing language corpora for the purposes of studies into communication and social discourses. Participants will acquire practical skills at designing and building representative, balanced and comparable corpora for research purposes. Students will practice work with corpora with the use of concordancers (e.g. Wordsmith, Antconc, Sketchengine), including the formulation of research questions, analysis and interpretation of quantitative data and methodological triangulation to interpret and critically assess social phenomena. Case studies will mainly cover corpus studies into press, political and legal discourse.

Content:

1) Theoretical tenants of corpus linguistics and methodological issues related to corpus studies (corpus as a method and corpus as theory).

2) Main research trends: synchronic and diachornic studies

3) Applications of corpus studies in discourse analysis, sociolinguistics and translation studies

4) Types of corpora: comparable corpus and parallel corpus; monolingual and multilingual corpora

5) Working with national corpora

6) Building own corpora

7) Corpus analysis with software: word lists, keyword lists, concordances and n-grams

8) Methodological triangulation: combination of quantitative and qualitative methods.

FORMS OF WORK (...)

If classroom learning is impossible, the workshop will be conducted with the help of distance communication tools, most probably Google Meet and others recommended by the University.

1. Baker, Paul (2010). Sociolinguistics and Corpus Linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

2. Biber, Douglas and Susan Conrad (2009). Register, Genre, and Style. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

3. McEnery, Tony, Andrew Hardie. (2011). Corpus Linguistics. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

K2_W01 Has an in-depth knowledge of the theoretical tenants and methodologies of corpus linguistics

K2_W06 Has detailed knowledge of research schools and trends in corpus linguistics and their achievements

K2_W07 Knows advanced methods of corpus linguistics which enable him/her to identify, analyse and interpret phenomena in human communication and social discourses

K2_U01 Using various sources, including own corpora, s/he can search, select, analyse, evaluate and integrate data concerning language, communication and discursive aspects of social life and to formulate critical judgments on this basis

K2_U02 Has well-developed research skills in the area of discourse analysis with the use of corpus-based tools, including an analysis and synthesis of theoretical views, selection of methods and design of research tools, analysis and presentation of findings

K2_K08 Can participate in the preparation of projects in the field of communication and social discourses

Preparation of a group research project with corpus methods, its in-class presentation and submission of research report for grading

Attendance and active participation in the class. Permissible number of absences: 2

Assessment criteria: 100-90% - very good, 89-80% good plus, 79-70% good, 69-60% sufficient plus, 59-51% sufficient, 50-0% fail

Resit requirements: a research report