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corpus

1. What is a corpus?

A corpus (plural = corpora) is a collection of authentic texts -written texts and transcriptions of spoken language- in a computer-readable format (i.e. the texts are saved as a text file and stored in a hard disk or CD-ROM) to be used for language studies.

2. What can we do with a corpus?

We can do some research on language patterns and uses, based on corpus data. The results of such analysis can be used as a basis for writing a learner dictionary, designing general English and ESP/EAP syllabuses, and developing language-awareness tasks and materials.

3. What tool do we need to analyse corpus data?

What we need is a ‘concordancer’ or ‘concordancing software’, which allows us to analyse corpus data in many ways such as checking word frequency and word collocation. A concordancer can also present the corpus data in the form of concordance lines. Concordance lines are examples of words or phrases uniquely presented in the way that the words or phrases under investigation are aligned in the middle of the page with their left and right contexts. This makes it easy for us to notice phraseology and collocation of words e.g. words that come before or after search words.

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