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The use of language corpora, or large samples of natural texts, has become ubiquitous in linguistic research. Yet, there are no conceptual or methodological frameworks for corpus representativeness. This book is the first to provide the field of linguistics with a comprehensive framework for corpus design, evaluation, and representativeness.
List of contents
1. Introduction; 2. Approaches to representativeness in previous corpus linguistic research; 3. Corpus representativeness: a conceptual and methodological framework; 4. Domain considerations; 5. Distribution considerations; 6. The influence of domain and distribution considerations on corpus representativeness - bringing it all together; 7. Corpus design and representativeness in practice; Glossary; Appendix A. Example articles documenting existing corpora; Appendix B. Survey of corpus design and compilation practices.
About the author
Jesse Egbert is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at Northern Arizona University. He is a co-founding General Editor of Register Studies, and his recent books focus on online register variation (2018), methodogical triangulation (2016, 2020), and corpus linguistics methods (2020).Douglas Biber is Regents' Professor of Applied Linguistics at Northern Arizona University. Previous books include Register, Genre, and Style (2009/2019), Grammar of Spoken and Written English (2021), and studies of register variation (1988, 1995, 2018).Bethany Gray is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics and Technology at Iowa State University. Her publications include monographs on academic research articles (2015), historical change in writing (2016). She is a co-founding General Editor of Register Studies.
Summary
The use of language corpora, or large samples of natural texts, has become ubiquitous in linguistic research. Yet, there are no conceptual or methodological frameworks for corpus representativeness. This book is the first to provide the field of linguistics with a comprehensive framework for corpus design, evaluation, and representativeness.