Corpus linguistics is the study of language as expressed in samples (corpora) or "real world" text. The approach runs counter to Noam Chomsky's view that real language is riddled with performance-related errors, thus requiring careful analysis of small speech samples obtained in a highly controlled laboratory setting. Corpus Linguistics does away with Chomsky's competence/performance split, viewing that we can only ever reliably analyse language if the researcher does not interfere. In law a corpus (Latin: body) is a set, a collection of documents and sources. ... Avram Noam Chomsky, Ph. ...

In some areas there is an overlap with computational linguistics, as the latter moves towards language processing applications. This means dealing with real input data, where descriptions based on a linguist's intuition are not usually helpful. Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical and logical modeling of natural language from a computational perspective. ... Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of artificial intelligence and linguistics. ...

A landmark in modern corpus linguistics was the publication by Henry Kucera and Nelson Francis of Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English in 1967, a work based on the analysis of the Brown Corpus, a carefully compiled selection of current American English, totalling about a million words drawn from a wide variety of sources. Kucera and Francis subjected it to a variety of computational analyses, from which they compiled a rich and variegated opus, combining elements of linguistics, language teaching, psychology, statistics, and sociology. Henry Kucera (born 1925) is a Czech linguist who was a pioneer in corpus linguistics and linguistic software. ... The Brown Corpus of Standard American English (or just Brown Corpus) was compiled by Henry Kucera and W. Nelson Francis at Brown University, Providence, RI as a general corpora in the field of corpus linguistics. ...

Shortly thereafter Boston publisher Houghton-Mifflin approached Kucera to supply a million word, three-line citation base for its new American Heritage Dictionary, the first dictionary to be compiled using corpus linguistics. The AHD made the innovative step of combining prescriptive elements (how language should be used) with descriptive information (how it actually is used). The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (AHD) is a dictionary of American English published by Boston publisher Houghton-Mifflin, the first edition of which appeared in 1969. ...

Other publishers followed suit. The British publisher Collins' COBUILD dictionaries, designed for users learning English as a foreign language, were compiled using the Bank of English. COBUILD, an acronym for Collins Birmingham University International Language Database, is a British research facility set up at the University of Birmingham in 1980 and funded by Collins publishers. ... ... The Bank of English is the name of the COBUILD corpus, a collection of English texts. ...

The Brown Corpus has also spawned a number of similarly structured corpora: the LOB Corpus (1960s British English), Kolhapur (Indian English), Wellington (New Zealand English), ACE (australian English), the Frown Corpus (early 1990s American English), and the FLOB Corpus (1990s British English). Other corpora represent many languages, varieties and modes, and include The British National Corpus, a 100 million word collection of a range of spoken and written texts, created in the 1990s by a consortium of publishers, universities (Oxford and Lancaster) and the British Library. There is a project underway to create an American National Corpus. The Brown Corpus of Standard American English (or just Brown Corpus) was compiled by Henry Kucera and W. Nelson Francis at Brown University, Providence, RI as a general corpora in the field of corpus linguistics. ... The University of Oxford, located in the city of Oxford in England, is the oldest university in the English-speaking world. ... Lancaster University (originally created as the University of Lancaster) is a campus university in Lancaster, England. ... British Library Ossulston St entrance, with distinctive red logo. ... American National Corpus (ANC) is a paid membership-based collaboratory. ...

See further

• corpus
• concordance (KWIC)
• collocation
• keyword
• lexical profiles
• machine translation
• semantic prosody
• translation memory

In law a corpus (Latin: body) is a set, a collection of documents and sources. ... Look up Concordance on Wiktionary, the free dictionary see Concordance system for usage in politics. ... KWIC is an acronym for Keyword In Context, the most common format for concordance lines. ... This article is in need of attention. ... In computer science, a keyword is an identifier which indicates a specific command. ... It has been suggested that Linguistic rules based methods be merged into this article or section. ... Also called discourse prosody, it describes the tendency of certain words to co-occur with either negative or positive expressions. ... A translation memory, or TM, is a software program designed as an aid for human translators. ...

External links

• McEnery and Wilson's Corpus Linguistics Page
• Research and Development Unit for English Studies
• The Centre for Corpus Linguistics at Birmingham University
• A Corpus-Linguistic Approach to Demography: an example of corpus linguistics gone awry.