L615, Corpus Linguistics

Advances in computer technology have revolutionized the ways
linguists can approach their data. By using computers, we can access
large bodies of text (corpora) and search for the phenomena in which
we are interested.  In this way, we can uncover complexities in
naturally-occurring data and explore issues related to frequency of
usage.

In this course, the following questions will be investigated: What is
a corpus?  What corpora exist?  How are corpora developed?  What is
XML?  How does one search for specific phenomena in corpora?  What is
a concordancer?  Do we need syntactic annotation?  Are there programs
that do the annotation automatically?  Are there tools that help me
search in linguistically annotated corpora?