Quantitative Corpus Linguistics with R

2The Three Central Corpus-linguistic Methods

This last point leads me, with some slight trepidation, to make a comment on our field in general, an informal observation based largely on a number of papers I have read as submissions in recent months. In particular, we seem to be witnessing as well a shift in the way some linguists find and utilize data—many papers now use corpora as their primary data, and many use internet data.

(Joseph 2004:382)

In this chapter, you will learn what a corpus is (plural: corpora) and what the three methods are to which nearly all corpus-linguistic work can be reduced.

2.1 Corpora

Before we start to actually look at corpus linguistics, we have to clarify our terminology a little. In this book, I will distinguish ...