Advantages and limitations of the corpus lexicography.

A corpus: any body of text collected with the aim of analyzing its features.

A corpus in lexicography now: an electronic corpus, containing a vast number of words from many different sources.

Before the age of computers, corpora were created by hand

First modern, large-scale corpus of English compiled for lexical study: Edward Thorndike’s Teacher’s Word Book

Pre-electronic corpus with most impact on lexicography were those created for teaching English to foreign learners (ELT:ESL-EFL)

The Interim Report on Vocabulary Selection, 1936, Palmer. West, Faucett, and Hornby

History

Chomskyans (based off of theories of Noam Chomsky) were hostile to quantitative approach to language studies

The term “Corpus linguistics”

The “Brown Corpus” first major, computer-based study

LOB Corpus

Quirk’s Survey of English Usage

COBUILD Project

History

Randomization of selection, limits on number of “hits”, lemmatized search

Ability to look at connotation / usage beyond what can be inferred

ESL lexicographers have to consider decoding and encoding purposes

Collocation – commonly co-occurring words, corpus allows for study of frequency

Machine translation of parallel corpora is progressing

Corpus Use in Modern Lexicography

Text collection focused on:

Certain areas

Time periods

Purposes

Scale

Categories

Concordancing programs

Word “tags” that make searches easier, more impactful

Compiling a Corpus

Dictionary usage of corpora

Benefits are many

Widespread use of corpora in lexicography will vastly improve quality of dictionaries

However, complete rework will cost a considerable amount

May be an ongoing process, not an overnight one

Corpus Use in the Future