What corpora can do for you: an introduction to corpus methods and corpus tools

Corpus linguistics lies at the crossroads between linguistic theory and linguistic method, and thus has a lot to offer to linguists both at the methodological and theoretical level. In line with the title of the symposium, this workshop therefore hopes to provide a sound introduction to corpus linguistics that strikes a balance between insights into linguistic theory and corpus methods and tools. The workshop will be divided into two parts (2 x 1h30). The first part will take the form a lecture that aims to: o Show the relation between corpus linguistics and linguistic theory, i.e. explain how corpora have contributed to linguistic theory. o Cover some important notions that are central to corpus linguistics (e.g. phraseology, collocation, colligation, semantic prosody). o Provide an overview of what corpora exist, focusing more specifically on recent developments of using the web as a corpus, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of each type of corpus, and identifying challenges that lie ahead. o Provide an overview of a range of available corpus tools that make it possible to exploit corpora, again highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of different types of tools. In the second part, participants will be given a hands-on introduction to the software AntConc, which is a versatile open source software that makes it possible to work with one’s own corpora. This part will be centered around a set of specific linguistic questions, and it will be shown how these questions can be answered relying on raw or part-of-speech tagged corpora, making use of the following tools: o Concordancing and sorting o Basic and more advanced search syntax o Collocations o Clusters (with or without a specific node) o KeyWord