Using analysis corpus software to analyze specialized texts

1. What is corpus?

          A corpus (sometimes used in the plural form ‘corpora’) can be generally defined as ………. ‘A collection of naturally-occurring texts in a computer-readable format which can be retrieved and analyzed using corpus analysis software’(Kennedy,1998; McEnery & Wilson, 2001; O’Keeffe,A., McCarthy, M., & Carter, R. ,2007; Tuebert & Cermakova, 2007)

2. Sources of language corpora

• Subscribe to a large corpus provider such as the British National Corpus (BNC).
• Use web concordancing.
• Compile own corpora and analyze data using analysis software
• Antconc (for monolingual corpus)
• Wordsmith (for monolingual corpus)
• Paraconc (for multilingual corpus)

3. Designing a specialized corpus (based on Bowker and Pearson 2002)

• Corpus size

• There are no fixed rules; depending on research purposes, availability of data and time.

• Text extracts vs. full text

• Depends on the aim of corpus compilation.

• Number of texts

• Depends on your research focus.

• Medium

• Can be spoken or written texts or mixed, it depends on research questions.

• Subject and text type

• Should mainly focus on the specialized text under investigation.

• Text type within a specialized subject field may vary from technical to popular texts.

• Other considerations

• Authorship: Texts written by experts in a field tend to present more reliable.

• Language: Specialized texts can be stored and retrieved in the form of monolingual, comparable, or parallel corpora.

• Publication date: Texts should come from recent publications unless queries are made in relation to particular period of time.

4. Sources of specialized texts

• Printed materials software
• Word document texts
• CD-ROMs
• Texts on the web
• Online database

5. Getting started with Antconc

• Download the latest version of Antconc.

• Creating a specialized corpus profile (adapted from Bowker and Pearson 2002:72)

A sample profile

• Doing small-scaled research on your own specialized corpora.

Using corpora to do research in ESP

• To identify frequent words or clusters in a specialized corpus. 

• To identify key words in a specialized corpus in comparison with a general corpus for syllabus design, materials development, or terminological studies.

• To examine language patterning and phraseology of words in a specialized text.

• To examine meaning of specialized vocabulary.