Homework 08.10.2001: Reading assignment The BNC Handbook, pp. 4-27.
Homework 15.10.2001: Re-read the pages from The BNC Handbook. Use the “Reading
guide” below to assist you.
Teach yourself to become ‘expert readers’. Here is lesson one:
When experts read difficult texts, they read slowly and reread often. They struggle with
the text to make it comprehensible. They hold confusing passages in mental suspension,
having faith that later parts of the essay will clarify earlier parts. They “nutshell”
passages as they proceed, often writing gist statements in the margins. They read a
difficult text a second and a third time, considering first readings as approximations of
rough drafts. They interact with the text by asking questions, expressing disagreements,
linking the text with other readings or with personal experience. [...]
In contrast, our students imagine that expert readers are “speed readers”. [...]
students push themselves to read faster instead of slower. Consequently, they do not
allot enough study time for reading and rereading. If they do not understand the text on
first reading, they assume that it is the teacher’s job to explain the text to them. Since
teachers regularly do so, the students’ reading difficulty initiates a vicious circle: the
teacher’s willingness to explain the text [...] deprives students of the very practice and
challenge they need to grow as readers.
(Beans, J. C. 1996. Engaging ideas. The professor’s guide to integrating writing,
critical thinking, and active learning in the classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass
Publishers. 134.)
Reading guide: The BNC Handbook, pp. 4-27.
You need not (yet) endeavour to acquire all the facts provided in the chapter. Your main task
is to try to comprehend as much as possible of the contents. Please do use marginal notes (=
‘notatki na marginesie’) in your copies to indicate your interaction with the text. Some
indication of the basic ‘chunks’ of knowledge included in the chapter can be gleaned by
viewing the subchapter and section headings listed in the initial list of the book’s contents.
The small guide provided below is meant to help you focus even more on the basic issues.
Comprehension questions:
1. What is a language corpus? How does it differ from e.g. an archive of texts?
2. What are some of the main beneficiaries of corpus-based linguistic research?
3. What kinds of information is vested in language corpora? Which kinds are especially
valuable? Is there a limit to what you can obtain from a corpus (in your opinion)? THIS
SECTION IS IMPORTANT IN THAT IT PROVIDES AN OVERVIEW OF POSSIBLE
RESEARCH AVENUES WITHIN CORPUS LINGUISTICS. WHICH OF THE LISTED
AREAS OF INQUIRY INTERESTS YOU? YOUR ANSWER MAY CONSTITUTE A
STRONG STARTING POINT TOWARDS FORMULATING YOUR OWN RESEARCH
TOPIC.
4. What are some of the techniques for accessing a corpus (i.e. viewing, retrieving and
processing info, etc.)?
5. What is the difference between a collocation and a colligation?
6. What kinds of corpora can you name?
7. What is the relation between corpus linguistics and Chomskian linguistics?
8. What is the key concept in language description as practised by corpus linguists? Try to
demonstrate its importance.
9. What kinds of corpora can be usefully compared? What does it mean to compare corpora,
in practical terms?
10. What is NLP and how is it related to corpus-based research?
11. In what ways has corpus linguistics influenced language teaching?
12. Corpus design: name some basic considerations and some possible compilation criteria.
Try to explain how the principle of Zipfian distribution affects corpus size.
13. Corpus-preprocessing: what forms of annotation is typical of computer-processable
corpora? What is the difference between part-of-speech tagging and syntactic parsing?
A sample list of useful technical terms and specialist phrases for you to put in
your personal corpus linguistics glossary:
(language) corpus (and all the types of corpora listed in the chapter, e.g. parallel corpus,
mixed corpus etc.)
introspection
empirical
corpus-based
relative frequency
high-frequency item/phenomenon etc.
sample
sampling (procedure/criteria etc.)
randomly selected
occurrence
cooccurrence
more/less frequent than chance
concordance
KWIC (= key word in context)
frequency count
NLP (= natural language processing)
colligation
semantic prosody
genre
text type
encode
mark-up
language variety
collocation
span of words
node word
idiom principle
open-choice principle
wordform
(word) type
(word) token
type/token ratio
lemma
lemmatisation
lexicogrammar
probabilistic
Zipfian distribution
annotation
word-sense
disambiguation
parsing
tag
transcription
Big names to know sth about:
Chomsky
Firth
Sinclair
Zipf
Essential corpora:
Bank of English
Brown
BNC
ICLE
LOB
London-Lund Corpus