This course allows Masters-level students to examine how new technologies and vast bodies of real language data have transformed the study of discourse and meaning in the English language. In it, we examine multi-million-word collections of language and focus on analysing real data using computational tools to find out more about language, culture, and society. (Note that, while computational methods will be used extensively on the course, no specialised computing knowledge is required for this course.)

1x1hr lecture; 1x1hr practical class per week over 10 weeks as scheduled on MyCampus, may be taught in conjunction with ENGLANG4032.

This is one of the MSc options in English Language and Linguistics, and for the MSc in Speech, Language, and Sociolinguistics, and may not run every year. The options that are running this session are available on MyCampus.

ENGLANG4007 Digital Humanities for Language and Literature

ENGLANG4032: Corpus Linguistics

None

Course project (2500 words) - 50%

Portfolio of technical exercises - 50%

This course aims to:

■ introduce students to specialist digital tools and techniques for the study of the English language via speech and language corpora;

■ develop students' specialist skills in the application of techniques, and/or instruments, and/or methodologies of corpus linguistics, including accessing research speech and language corpora; 

■ enhance students' capacity for independent work by pursuing specific research questions using the detailed analyses of speech and language corpora

By the end of this course students will be able to:

■ apply specialist modern digital technologies to English language data in a range of current fields, such as concordance analysis, collocate analysis, keyword analysis, and corpus stylistic analysis; 

■ summarize, illustrate, and critically evaluate a range of current methodologies, language resources, and tools for research in English corpus linguistics, with reference to different types of linguistic investigation;

■ identify, and construct creative solutions to, research questions about the English language best solved through corpus linguistic approaches;

■ address a chosen research question of appropriate complexity about the English language using one of the technologies introduced in the course.

Students must submit at least 75% by weight of the components (including examinations) of the course's summative assessment.