Corpus Linguistics DIS

Antconc: An introduction My first work with AntConc was in a class on world English varieties. As part of a major project, I was required to download one of the ICE corpora for a variety of English. Being a sucker for punishment, I opted for Canadian English because there isn’t much difference outside of accent and inflection. This gave me a good initiation to how the software works because I had to really search to find differences. This was around the time I was getting interested in linguistics so I started playing around with the software for fun. Being freeware, AntConc is great for classes because it provides an overview of general corpus tools but doesn’t add additional costs to students. However, it is also less user-friendly and harder to use without more experienced direction. The formatting for corpus samples can be difficult, because AntConc can only read .txt documents. This erases all formatting and causes some errors. When uploading books, I found that aste...

Corpus linguistics has a long and rich history with a great number of misconceptions. The term itself first appears in the 80's, but early analog methods of corpus linguistics have been around much longer. In essence, corpus linguistics is a means of studying a sample of words using a computer. For example, the BYU COCA compiles a massive amount of text from media outlets, such as Scientific American, or The New York Times. From that sample, we can extract every instance of word being used in the media compiled, and draw conclusions about that word's representation (or lack thereof). The beauty of corpus linguistics, as I mentioned in my previous post, is that it provides empirical data that is more objective than other means of study in linguistics. This allows for stronger arguments and more effective proofs. For example, it can be argued that minorities are portrayed negatively in media. It is far more effective to be able to say that out of the 800 times that black people ...

Going into English was a decision I made a very long time ago, and never looked back until I entered grad school. In a lot of ways, literature is the reason I'm so successful now. Growing up where I did, there were three pastimes: get high, get drunk, or get pregnant. I built a fourth option of play video games and read books. When I ran out of books to read, I read encyclopedias and studied dictionaries. This saved my early education. Being from an area that was a mixture of methlab trailer parks and high value ranch land, teachers would peg a student for success or failure by the first week. Because I always had my nose in a book and taught myself a few years of schooling at home, I guess I was assumed to be from the ranch land. Not that being white didn't help immensely. Growing up, I became aware of the inequities of the world quickly. My friends who were just as smart as me were pegged for failure for no real reason. I grew up wanting to fix that, and becoming a teacher ...