LING 3P95 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Discourse Analysis, Test Of English As A Foreign Language, Illocutionary Act
18 Apr 2016
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Document Summary
What is a corpus: a collection of spoken or written authentic texts representative of a particular area of language use; computer readable so as to be accessible by concordance tools. What do corpus studies do: improve our understanding of written and spoken discourse by drawing on collections of texts that are stored and analyzed electronically. Examples of specialized corpora: micase, base, toefl, wrelfa. Discourse analysts have been known to compile their own corpora to discuss particular features present in certain discourse genres. Corpora may be large or small and have their advantages and disadvantages as research tools. Example of how language is actually being used. Representativeness sample; you have to decide how much is enough. Validity; what type of text are we dealing with. Consider these issues when hearing about donna"s construction of a specialized corpus. What can we use it to investigate. Distribution and functions of grammatical forms and categories.
