Corpora

A corpus may be defined as “a large collection of instances of spoken and written texts” (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004, p. 29), as “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 study”

(Hunston, 2002, p. 2), and more recently as “collections of texts (or parts of text)

that are stored and accessed electronically” (Hunston, 2002, p. 2). Sinclair adds a new dimension to the definition by pointing out that “a corpus is a collection of naturally-occuring language text, chosen to characterize a state or variety of a language” (1991, p. 171).

Corpora, which were first constructed in computer-readable form in the 1960s and 1970s (Stubbs, 1996, p. xvii), have made the observation of language possible. In the past, language description relied on introspection, which utilized intuitions, and elicitation, which drew on the intuitions of other members of the community.

Although these two methods of linguistic data collection reveal information about the formal properties and the typical functioning of language, they do not expose data about actual language behaviour (Widdowson, 1996, pp. 72-73). Corpora make the observation of language possible on a vast scale (Widdowson, 1996, p. 73) and provide authentic data. Referring to this authenticity, Halliday and Matthiessen maintain that “what people actually say is very different from what they think they say; and even more different from what they think they ought to say” (2004, p. 34).

Sinclair calls this ‘objective evidence’ (1991, p. 1) and holds that supporting the idea that “invented examples can actually represent the language better than real ones” is

‘absurd’ (1991, p. 5). Cook and Prodromou suggest that corpus data include all the peculiarities of native speaker language and contain cultural elements, and therefore material to be presented to the learner should be adapted according to the local context. On the other hand, Carter, like Sinclair, advocates the use of genuine language with learners, saying that otherwise the learner would always be an average user of the language and would be deprived of the opportunity to use the language at a native speaker level (cited in Deterding, 2005).

A corpus gives information about what language is like, and it is more dependable than native speaker intuition since although the native speaker has “experience of very much more language than is contained in even the largest corpus, much of that experience remains hidden from introspection” (Hunston, 2002, p. 20). Intuition is not very helpful in four aspects of language: collocation, frequency, prosody and phraseology. It is easy to intuit some common collocations, such as ‘play – game’, while it is not for some others such as adverb-adjective combinations, such as

‘acutely aware’. Without corpus evidence, the native speaker may not be aware of them (Hunston, 2002, p. 21). Similarly, without corpus data, being conscious of the relative frequency of words, phrases and structures is difficult. For native speakers, it is equally difficult to intuit many instances of pragmatic meaning, and also unusual phraseology without corpus backup (Hunston, 2002, pp. 21-22). However, intuition is very important in “extrapolating important generalizations from a mass of specific information in a corpus” (p. 22). Hunston stresses the fact that “the corpus simply offers the researcher plenty of examples, only intuition can interpret them” (2002, p. 23).

Over the last few decades, “corpora, and the study of corpora, have revolutionized the study of language and the applications of language” (Hunston, 2002, p. 1), as computers became more accessible, and more technologically advanced, making it possible to handle large amounts of data and allowing more corpus studies to be conducted (Hunston 2002, Biber et al. 1998). Biber et al. also maintain that empirical investigations of corpora “can shed new light on previously intractable research questions in linguistics” (1998, p. ix), and the corpus-based approach “has opened the way to a multitude of new investigations of language use” (1998, p. 3).

According to Biber et al. (1998), through the study of corpora, it is not possible to determine what is possible in language, but how the language is actually used in naturally occurring texts (p. 1). Therefore, a corpus-based approach involves the study of language use, and analysts “attempt to uncover typical patterns rather than making judgments of grammaticality” (Biber et al., 1998, p. 3). Hunston similarly draws attention to the fact that a corpus does not give information about the possibility of a language item. Instead, it will present data on its frequency.

Furthermore, she adds that a statement about evidence in a corpus will be relevant for that particular corpus, and therefore “conclusions about language drawn from a corpus have to be treated as deductions, not as facts” (2002, pp. 22-23).

The corpus-based approach is empirical, “analyzing the actual patterns of use in natural texts”, and relies on quantitative as well as qualitative analytical techniques (Biber et al., 1998, p. 4). Biber et al. point out one important consideration for corpus-based approaches. The analyses should go beyond simple counts of linguistic features, and include qualitative, functional interpretations of quantitative patterns (1998, pp. 4-5). Hunston similarly maintains that a corpus provides evidence in the form of many examples which can only be interpreted by intuition (2002, p. 23).

A corpus-based approach may study the language use patterns for a linguistic structure, the language of a text or a group of speakers / writers, or the language of different texts or groups of texts (Hunston, 2002, p. 2). The patterns of language use in different texts provide information on language varieties, how different situations require different language registers. Such studies attempt to describe the characteristics of registers, in which grammatical and lexical choices play a major role (Hunston, 2002, p. 2). McCarthy also emphasizes the ‘social’ dimension of

corpora and corpus linguistics. He states that “its method, gathering large amounts of representative data, whether written or spoken, immerses it in the social, the world of texts and users, of producers and consumers” (2001, p. 125).

There are different approaches to corpora (McCarthy, 2001). The ‘corpus-based’

approach is using corpora to demonstrate some known facts about the language. On the other hand, through a ‘corpus-driven’ approach, one can “go with a completely open mind to a corpus, willing to be guided, illuminated by it in ways one could not dream of”. A third approach, which critics of corpus work like Widdowson fail to explore according to McCarthy, is the ‘corpus-informed approach’. Widdowson claims that ‘freezing language in a computer database’ decontextualizes language and makes it impossible to use it as ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ in the language classroom (cited in McCarthy, 2001, p. 128). However, McCarthy holds that with the corpus-informed approach, the applied linguist can “mediate the corpus, design it from the very outset and build it with applied linguistic questions in mind, ask of it the questions applied linguists want answers to, and filter its output, use it as a guide or tool for what you, the teacher, want to achieve” (2001, p. 129). Extracting lexico-grammatical information from a corpus is an example for this approach (McCarthy, 2001, p. 138).

A corpus can do nothing at all by itself, but corpus access software re-arranges this store of used language, allows observations of various kinds to be made and provides a new perspective on language (Hunston, 2002, p. 3). Corpus analysis tools manage data in three ways: to show frequency, phraseology, and collocation (2002, p. 3), which will be explained in Chapter three in detail. Frequency counts are very useful, since they give valuable information on the frequencies of lexical and

grammar words in different corpora (Hunston, 2002, p. 3), as well as frequencies of categories of linguistic items (e.g. present and past tenses) across registers (2002, p.

8). Through phraseology, on the other hand, differences between easily confused words can be easily observed from the concordance lines (Hunston, 2002, p. 12).

Through concordance lines, it is also possible to observe the ‘central and typical’, meaning distinctions, meaning and pattern, and detail (Hunston, 2002, p. 42).

Although a corpus cannot be used to establish what is impossible or possible in a language, it provides information about ‘central and typical usage’. Typicality involves “the most frequent meanings or collocates or phraseology of an individual word or phrase” (Hunston, 2002, p. 42). Centrality, on the other hand, “can be applied to categories of things rather than to individual words” (2002, p. 43). For example, although present progressive can be used for the present, the future, or no specific time, the central use is for the present time. A corpus serves an important purpose here as the prototypical (what is felt to be typical) may not be the most frequent (Hunston, 2002, pp. 43-44). Exploring collocations in corpora is also very valuable, as they “can indicate pairs of lexical items, … , or the association between a lexical word and its frequent grammatical environment”, the latter frequently called ‘colligation’ (Hunston, 2002, p. 12). Collocational information can be useful in highlighting the different meanings of a word, therefore providing a semantic profile of the word, and in obtaining a profile of the semantic field of a word (Hunston, 2002, pp. 75-79).