Corpus Presenter: Software for Language Analysis with a Manual and A corpus of Irish English As Sample Data (review)

In its software and extensive documentation, Raymond Hickey’s Corpus presenter aims to put into the hands of students and scholars ‘tools for corpus compilation and analysis’. The software comprises a suite of programs compatible with recent versions of Windows. Together, these programs make possible the preparation of texts for inclusion in a corpus, management and processing of those texts, and management of the data resulting from processing. Some of the twenty-six programs in the suite are perhaps unnecessary for today’s fast computers—the suite’s word processor, for example, is doubled by a fast text editor, and the file manager by a ‘lite’ file manager—but H has considered what a corpus investigator might need and tried to provide every tool.

The accompanying book comprises four sections. Section 1, ‘Corpus linguistics’ (1–26), offers a brief history of the discipline, reviews preparation of texts for different types of corpora, suggests some of the common ways in which a linguist might examine corpora, and details seven sample analyses based on existing corpora to demonstrate the power of the software to elucidate the characteristics of bodies of texts. Perhaps most powerfully, Corpus presenter allows one to create a ‘syntactic frame’, specifying two search strings with definable scope (e.g. ‘whole word’ or ‘end of word’) and the number of intervening items, allowing accurate retrieval of fairly complex linguistic features.

Section 2, ‘The corpus presenter suite’ (28–182), is a manual for the software, beginning with an overview of the suite and its functions and then covering each of the twenty-six component programs in turn. This part of the book will be most useful in answering questions that arise during use of the software. The same is true of section 3, ‘Appendices’ (184–236), where H discusses installation, common commands, the extended file interface, troubleshooting, and data-set files. Of greatest long-term interest in this section is the manual’s glossary, which defines terms related to both computing and statistics.

Section 4, ‘A corpus of Irish English’ (237–85), provides documentation for the included corpus, which places ‘the majority of available texts for Irish English from the late Middle Ages to the beginning of the twentieth century at the disposal of interested scholars’ (237). This section, serving as a model of corpus documentation, concludes with a bibliography and a glossary of terms. Corpus presenter ends with a brief index (287–92).

H has provided a useful set of tools for linguists and literary scholars who concern themselves with large collections of texts. The documentation, in spite of occasional typographical errors, does what it sets out to do, making possible the productive use of a collection of software that is both powerful and relatively easy to use. H notes that he cannot provide technical support for the suite, but the software’s behavior supports his claim that it is well tested and able to achieve its intended ends.