List of topics

1. Introduction: Historical outline, corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches, types of corpora

2. Collocation: First queries with BNC: running the query, KWIC and Sentence view, ordering the results, viewing a larger context and bibliographical information, restricting the query

3. The simple query: Simple query syntax, words and phrases, variation in phrases, using wildcards,proximity queries

4. Distribution and sorting: Comparing results, normalized frequencies, statistical significance, dispersion and file-frequency extremes

5. Collocations: Making statistical claims, association measures

6. Colligation, pattern grammar: Queries based on part-of-speech and headword/lemma, tagging and parsing

7. Keywords and frequency lists: Text-type and word lists, using keywords in stylistic analysis

8. Corpora of spoken language: Problems of transcription, metadata, speakers’ characteristics

9. Corpora of academic spoken English: Representativeness; units of meaning in spoken corpora, lexical bundles, n-grams

10. Issues in corpus design: Purpose, size and representativeness, criteria of text selection, sampling, balance, homogeneity Working with self-designed corpora, Antconc, tagging

11. Corpora in contrastive research: Varieties of English, parallel and comparable corpora

12. Leaving the corpus: Extracting query results to an external database, presenting the results

PLUS: Three lectures of invited corpus linguists