The word “corpus”, derived from the Latin word meaning “body”, may be used to refer to any text in written or spoken form. However, in modern Linguistics this term is used to refer to large collections of texts which represent a sample of a particular variety or use of language(s) that are presented in machine readable form.
There are many different kinds of corpora. They can contain written or spoken (transcribed) language, modern or old texts, texts from one language or several languages. The texts can be whole books, newspapers, journals, speeches etc, or consist of extracts of varying length. The kind of texts included and the combination of different texts vary between different corpora and corpus types.
“Corpus studies boomed from 1980 onwards, as corpora, techniques and new arguments in favour of the use of corpora became more apparent. Currently this boom continues–and both of the ‘schools’ of corpus linguistics are growing . . .. Corpus linguistics is maturing methodologically and the range of languages addressed by corpus linguists is growing annually.”
(Tony McEnery and Andrew Wilson, Corpus Linguistics, Edinburgh University Press, 2001)
“To make good use of corpus resources a teacher needs a modest orientation to the routines involved in retrieving information from the corpus, and–most importantly–training and experience in how to evaluate that information.”
(John McHardy Sinclair, How to Use Corpora in Language Teaching, John Benjamins, 2004)
CASS is a Centre designed to bring a new method in the study of language – the corpus approach – to a range of social sciences. In doing so it provides an insight into the use and manipulation of language in society in a host of areas of pressing concern, including climate change, hate crime and education. By providing fresh perspectives on such problems, they are helping to develop new approaches to challenging practices such as hate speech both in terms of raising awareness and of informing policy makers and other stakeholders of how such language may be used to wound and offend.
