Reflection 7: Corpus Linguistics

Date   : 2nd April 2013
Day    : Tuesday
Topic  : Corpus Linguistic

Assalamualaikum and may all readers in the state of pink of health. Do you know how a dictionary can be produced? How such a book can happen to have so many words inside of it with the meanings and usage of the words in appropriate situation and condition? The answer is corpus linguistic. So what is corpus linguistic actually? It is a study of language and a method of linguistic analysis which uses a collection of natural or real word texts known as corpus. It deals with both spoken and written texts. It is a sample of a particular varieties or use of languages that are presented in machine readable form. What makes it more interesting is that it comes with description and explanation of nature, structure and use of language with particular matters. In addition, it highlights possible words, structures or uses in a language and shows probable occurrence in a language. It is not only restricted to one language instead several languages. Hence, it is applicable to language learning. Among roles of corpus linguistics are:

1) To store huge amount of text.

2) To quickly retrieve huge amount of texts.

3) To retrieve words, phrases or whole texts in context.

4) To sort out linguistics items.

5) To increase reliability and validity in searching, counting and sorting linguistics items.

6) To provide accurate probability of occurrence of specific linguistic items.

      All in all, corpus linguistics is a useful study that has been developed and can be used to guide students to learn languages more efficient. After learning this topic, we believe it has given us a fresh view about computer application in language studies.

          In addition, Corpus Linguistic provides more objective view about the analysis of language. By using computer, it gives proper analytical tools to analyze the words or sentences. We believe this field is very useful for classroom activities.