Introduction to a Corpus-Based Approach to Language Analysis

Nowadays, the usefulness of corpora is being rediscovered and corpora are proving an excellent resource for a wide range of research tasks, not only because they provide evidence of current language usage, but also because they permit us to compare synchronic and diachronic shifts within a language, and so become the foundation of analysis.
This thesis aims to be above all a basic introduction to corpus-based research for (translation) students and teachers with no or very limited knowledge of the area. The focus is on possible applications in a variety of domains, including grammar, lexicography, morphology, semantics, pragmatics, stylistics, ethnolinguistics and language teaching. It is hoped that by showing the potential of corpus-based research, more teachers and students will be motivated to try out similar studies themselves.
This work includes three main sections. After a short introduction, Chapter 2 deals with the history of linguistic research based on corpus evidence, from the early 1950s until today. Chapter 3 discusses the main elements of corpus-based research, exploring issues like corpus outline, corpus creation, the different kinds of corpora, the tools needed to exploit a corpus, finally focusing on the possibility of establishing a computer network for corpora studies. Chapter 4 places the emphasis on the numerous applications of corpus-based research, discussing both possible areas of research in linguistics and translation studies. The case study (Chapter 5) introduces an example of corpus exploitation which might be of relevance both to linguists and translators alike.
Conclusions are then drawn in Chapter 6, which summarises the main implications of a corpus-based approach and makes suggestions for new fields of application, both in linguistics and translation research.