Corpus Linguistics: Method, Analysis, Interpretation (FutureLearn)

Over eight weeks, you’ll build the skills necessary to collect and analyse large digital collections of text (corpora).
You’ll be introduced to a number of topics demonstrating the use of corpora in areas as diverse as discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and language learning and teaching.

What topics will you cover?

• Introduction to corpus linguistics and basic techniques: concordancing
• Further corpus techniques: collocation and keywords
• Corpus-based discourse analysis
• Building a corpus: tagging and processing data
• Sociolinguistics: analysing BNC1994 and BNC2014
• Textbook and dictionary construction
• Language learning and corpus linguistics
• Swearing extravaganza: looking at language and society

Learning on this course
You can take this self-guided course and learn at your own pace. On every step of the course you can meet other learners, share your ideas and join in with active discussions in the comments.

What will you achieve?
By the end of the course, you‘ll be able to...

• Interpret corpus data using techniques such as concordancing, collocation and keywords.
• Describe the main methodological underpinnings behind corpus linguistics.
• Apply corpus linguistic techniques to the analysis of different types of data.
• Collect own corpora.
• Design research studies using corpus methods.
• Explain corpus methods as well as a range of applications of this versatile methodology.
• Perform corpus analysis using a range of corpus tools such as #LancsBox, CQPweb, USAS and BNClab.

Who is the course for?
This course is designed for anyone with an interest in the study of language.