English Corpus Linguistics: An Introduction (review)

Charles F. Meyer sets out to illustrate the basics of corpus linguistics. He considers corpus linguistics to be a methodology for carrying out linguistic analysis that will become increasingly important in future research. This book is a rather detailed description of the process of designing, building, and analyzing a corpus. Study questions at the end of each chapter indicate that the book is particularly aimed at students in higher education.

The book is divided into three main parts, the first being the theoretical and historical foundation, the second dealing with corpus creation, and the third dealing with corpus analysis.

Before going into detail, the author shows the relation between linguistics in general and corpus analysis. M outlines several possible uses of corpus-based analysis in a number of theoretical and practical linguistic areas like lexicography, language variation, and historical linguistics, to name but a few.

The second part of the book (Chs. 2–4) describes how to plan, create, and annotate a corpus. Based largely on examples from the 100-million-word British National Corpus (BNC) and the International Corpus of English (ICE), the planning section answers questions such as what the length of the corpus and its text samples should be, and what genres and types of speakers should be included. It also deals with the actual process and the tools used for creating the computerized corpus. Some insight is given on how to represent spoken language in the collection of texts. M then shows how to prepare the corpus for linguistic analysis by explaining the techniques of tagging, parsing, and annotating, which means assigning lexical, syntactic, and semantic information to the elements within the corpus. He emphasizes the need for a clear representation of the textual structure of the samples by using a standardized tool like the standard generalized markup language (SGML) that was develeoped by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI).

The third part (Ch. 5) deals with analyzing a corpus. First, M points out the importance of having a clear research question that is supposed to be answered by the corpus analysis. In addition to that, the researcher needs to find out what corpus is best suited to carry out the study. On the more practical side, M explores how to extract and code the information needed using software tools and how to use statistics in order to make relevant scientific statements.

M assesses the future of corpus linguistics in the last chapter. He expects more sophisticated programming tools to appear, especially in the area of corpus analysis. The book is complemented by two appendices: Appendix 1 gives an alphabetic listing of 60 English language corpora including a short description and how or where they can be obtained or accessed, and Appendix 2 lists a number of computer programs for concordancing texts (the majority being PC or Mac-based, and some being web-based).