Introduction to Corpus Linguistics: Theoretical and methodological basics

Since the 1980’s and the rise of computer-assisted technologies, Corpus Linguistics (CL) has
become a mainstream methodology in linguistics, making it possible to analyze ‘very extensive
collections of transcribed utterances or written texts’ (McEnery & Hardie, 2012: i). This
workshop will be devoted to main theoretical and methodological basics of Corpus Linguistics.
It will be composed of three main parts. Firstly, we will address the process of corpus
construction, with a focus on data collection, balance and representativeness. Secondly, we will
discuss essential notions of CL, such as tokens, types, concordances, collocations, corpus
annotation and the distinction between corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches. Finally, we
will present various types of specialized corpora (for example, monolingual and bilingual
corpora, learner corpora and political corpora) to give an overview of the research questions
that can be addressed thanks to Corpus Linguistics in a variety of disciplines.
This workshop will also include a hands-on session during which the participants will have the
opportunity to apply the notions that have been discussed to their own corpus, using the free
corpus processing softwares AntConc (http://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/antconc,
Anthony, 2019) and Unitex (https://unitexgramlab.org, Paumier, 2020).