Corpus Linguistics Flashcards
What is a corpus?
A collection of pieces of language text in electronic form, selected according to external criteria to represent a language or language variety as a source of data for linguistic research (Sinclair, 2005)
Word form
a given realisation of one lexeme e.g. broke is a word form of the lexeme BREAK
Lexeme
abstract unit underlying the different grammatical variants of a word e.g. lexeme BREAK —> broke, broken, breaking.
Lemma
set of lexical forms: base forms together with all inflected forms of same grammatical class e.g. BREAK, broke, broken, breaking, breaks
Word familiy
encompasses base form, inflexted forms, and transparent derivatives e.g. BREAK, broke… unbreakable, breaker
Lexical item
one or more words that together make up a unit of meaning - emphasises that most meaning associated with word patterns rather than individual words.
Collocations
Pairs of words that are commonly found together
Node
a search word that you analyse
Span
Size of the window of collocational search, i.e. how many words around the node to be analysed. Standard is +/- 4
Colligations
Focuses on the co-occurrence of grammatical elements - often highlight syntactic dependencies between words
Semantic preference
Lexical patterning demonstrating the tendencies of words to cluster with one another and become extended units of meaning e.g.
Partington (1998) ‘sheer’ phraseological patterning, collocated with words from 4 different semantic sets: magnitude/weight/volume, force, persistence, emotion.
Semantic prosody (aka discourse prosody)
Attitudinal or evaluative meanings that result from a word’s co-occurrence with specific collocations e.g. ‘fraught with’ has negative attitudinal tendency, whereas ‘brimming with’ reps a semantic prosody with positive connotations.
a word or phrase’s discourse function in conveying attitude or evaluation - function not typically recognised as playing
Partington’s (2004) note on semantic prosody
Quality and strength of semantic prosody of many vocabulary items might differ from genre to genre or from domain to domain.
Lexical bundles
Sequences of words that commonly occur together e.g. in order to, in the present study (academic English). Can e.g. mark stance (and I think that), or organise discourse (if you look at)
Chunks / Clusters
smaller bundles
Interdependence of words
“most lexical meaning is associated with word patterns rather than with individual words, and so the meaning of an individual word is very much dependent on the meaning of its neighbours and the phraseological patterns it enters.”
