Materials

• Downloads: There is a wide range of materials available to download. However, you will need a password to enter this page, which you can request via email. Alternatively, you can visit the office hour for corpus-linguistic projects (see below).

• Guide to Corpus Linguistics: A guide to corpus linguistics is available in room B 408 and in the download section. Its aim is to provide information about corpora and corpus linguistics, especially if you are working on a corpus project, writing a term paper or your final thesis.

Tutorials

• Practical Corpus-linguistic Tutorials take place on a regular basis. These tutorials are free of charge and are meant to serve as practical introductions to working with corpus-linguistic software tools such as WordSmith Tools or AntConc. Registration via Stud.IP (limited to 24 participants each).
  
• Dates for the next tutorials (see announcements on the fourth floor or Stud.IP for further details):
  
  

  Mon 11 June 14-18	"Corpus Linguistics with WordSmith Tools"
  Wed 13 June 9-12	"Dealing with Quantitative Data in Linguistics"
  later this semester...	"Corpus Linguistics with AntConc"

  
  

Office Hour for Corpus-linguistic Projects

Some important notes:

The korpuslinguistische Sprechstunde originated in the idea to support students with regard to different aspects of corpus linguistics. However, the purpose of the office hour is neither to explain to you what corpus linguistics is about, nor how you can work with a linguistic concordancer. (For these matters you will find sufficient material on the homepage, which you can download and work with at home. In addition, corpus-linguistic tutorials take place on a regular basis, and the reader “A guide to Corpus Linguistics” is available in the downloads section.)

The Sprechstunde is also not meant to assist you in finding your term paper or final thesis topics. You should rather think about a possible topic on your own and/or discuss it with your professor.

What the Sprechstunde intends to do is offer you support in various other ways, listed in the following. Here is what we can do to help you:

1. Technical support: In the office hour we will offer you technical help if you have problems with a corpus or a concordancer.
2. Creative input: If you have decided on a topic and you are not sure which corpus to take or which concordance program to work with, we might be able to give you some advice. Of course, you can also ask us about methodological issues.
3. Corpus supply: We can try to provide you with the corpora you need for your studies.

"How can I get the corpus material which has been provided on the homepage?"

Your lecturer in your linguistics class can provide you with the Username and Password. Alternatively we can send you an email with the relevant information, as long as you send us an email with your "…@uni.giessen.de" email address.

"What is a corpus? What is a concordancer, etc.?"

We will neither answer basic questions about corpus linguistics via email nor in the office hour. It is your task to inform yourself about basic corpus linguistic concepts. In order to do this, you should take a look at the introductory material provided on this homepage, which will answer some of these basic questions, and look for corpus-linguistic books in the library.

"Can you send me the ... corpus?"

No, due to copyright issues we cannot send you linguistic corpora. If you want them, you have to pick them up at the English Linguistics department.

"I have no time to come to the korpuslinguistische Sprechstunde during the office hours, what can I do?"

In that case just send us an email so that we can arrange an individual appointment with you.

"I want to write my thesis about a very specific feature of language and I haven’t found a corpus on the English linguistics homepage which reflects it. What can I do?"

First of all, the Internet is your friend. Before consulting us, you should see if such a specific corpus already exists and in case it does, check whether it is freely accessible. If it does exist but it is not accessible, you can ask us and we can check if we have a license for it. If what you need does not exist, you might consider compiling your own corpus. In that case you can consult us and we will give you some advice about some things to bear in mind in the compilation process.

"Most of the big reference corpora are rather outdated; do they still reflect current language use?"

True, the majority of the English reference corpora were compiled in the pre-Internet area. But since there are no huge current corpora available, they constitute the only possibility to analyze present language. Besides, note that language change is a slow process, so that corpora from the early 1990s still reflect current language use to a large extent.

In short, use the corpora that are available. As long as you state in your paper that they are not fully up-to-date (which again can have an influence on the results of your studies), there should be no bigger problems.

"I want to work with the BNCweb. How can I access it?"

In principle, anyone can access the BNC. Just go the homepage http://bncweb.lancs.ac.uk/bncwebSignup/ and register with your "...uni-giessen.de" email address. The BNC homepage offers a very detailed tutorial on how the BNC can be used. For more detailed information have a look at Sebastian Hoffmann et al. (2008): Corpus linguistics with BNCweb – a practical guide. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

"I have decided to create my own corpus. How big does it need to be?"

That really depends on what you want to analyze. As a rule of thumb, the more specific your analysis is, the bigger your corpus needs to be. In addition, it also depends on the sources for your corpus. Depending on your topic, it may be very hard to gain access to texts. In general, the standard size of many linguistic corpora is 1 million words. However, sometimes it is just not possible to create huge corpora due to limited sources or copyright restrictions. In other cases a much smaller corpus suffices to prove your point. In any case, as long as you should always explain the size of your corpus and the compilation process, you should be on the safe side.

You might also want to consider first compiling a pilot corpus, so that you can check beforehand how many instances you may possibly be finding in your corpus. Then you can decide on the size of your final corpus.