Using analysis corpus software to analyze specialized texts
1. What is corpus?
A corpus (sometimes used in the plural form ‘corpora’) can be generally defined as ………. ‘A collection of naturally-occurring texts in a computer-readable format which can be retrieved and analyzed using corpus analysis software’ (Kennedy,1998; McEnery & Wilson, 2001; O’Keeffe,A., McCarthy, M., & Carter, R. ,2007; Tuebert & Cermakova, 2007)
Sources of language corpora
· Subscribe to a large corpus provider such as the British National Corpus (BNC).
· Use web concordancing.
· Compile own corpora and analyze data using analysis software
§ Antconc (for monolingual corpus)
§ Wordsmith (for monolingual corpus)
§ Paraconc (for multilingual corpus)
Designing a specialized corpus (based on Bowker and Pearson 2002)
· Corpus size
§ There are no fixed rules; depending on research purposes, availability of data and time.
· Text extracts vs. full text
§ Depends on the aim of corpus compilation.
· Number of texts
§ Depends on your research focus.
· Medium
§ Can be spoken or written texts or mixed, it depends on research questions.
· Subject and text type
§ Should mainly focus on the specialized text under investigation.
§ Text type within a specialized subject field may vary from technical to popular texts.
· Other considerations
§ Authorship: Texts written by experts in a field tend to presentmore reliable.
§ Language: Specialized texts can be stored and retrieved in the form of monolingual, comparable, or parallel corpora.
Sources of specialized texts
· Printed materials software
· Word document texts
· CD-ROMs
· Texts on the web
· Online database
Getting started with Antconc
· Download the latest version of Antconc.
· Creating a specialized corpus profile (adapted from Bowker and Pearson 2002:72)
A sample profile
Size
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56,812 words
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Source of corpus data
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From the internet (www.voanews.com)
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Number of texts
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70 texts
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Medium
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written
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Subject
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News about South Korea
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Text types
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News article
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Authorship
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Journalist
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Language
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Texts written in English mostly by native speaker
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publication
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Recent text (retrieved in September 2017)
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· Doing small-scaled research on your own specialized corpora.
Using corpora to do research in ESP
§ To identify frequent words or clusters in a specialized corpus.
§ To identify key words in a specialized corpus in comparison with a general corpus for syllabus design, materials development, or terminological studies.
§ To examine language patterning and phraseology of words in a specialized text.
§ To examine meaning of specialized vocabulary.
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