Quantitative Corpus Linguistics with R

Description

The first textbook of its kind, Quantitative Corpus Linguistics with R demonstrates how to use the open source programming language R for corpus linguistic analyses. Computational and corpus linguists doing corpus work will find that R provides an enormous range of functions that currently require several programs to achieve – searching and processing corpora, arranging and outputting the results of corpus searches, statistical evaluation, and graphing.

Contents

1. Introduction

1.1 Why another introduction to corpus linguistics?

1.2 Outline of the book

1.3 Recommendation for instructors

2. Three central corpus-linguistic methods

2.1 Corpora

2.2 Frequency lists

2.3 Lexical co-occurrence: collocations

2.4 Grammatical and/or lexico-grammatical co-occurrence: concordances

3. A brief introduction to R

3.1 A few central notions: data structures, functions, and arguments

3.2 Vectors

3.3 Factors

3.4 Data frames

3.5 Lists

3.6 Elementary programming functions

3.7 Character/string processing

3.8 File and directory operations

4. Using R in corpus linguistics

4.1 Frequency lists

4.2 Concordances

4.3 Collocations

4.4 Excursus: processing multi-tiered corpora

5. Some statistics for corpus linguistics

5.1 Introduction to statistical thinking

5.2 Categorical dependent variables

5.3 Interval/ratio dependent variables

5.4 Customizing statistical plots

5.5 Reporting your results

6. Morphology/morphophonology

6.1 Example 1: -ic/-ical suffixation

6.2 Example 2: contraction of to be in speaking

7. Syntax

7.1 Example 1: iconicity in clause ordering

7.2 Example 2: prenominal adjective order

7.3 Example 3: the locative alternation

8. Semantics / Lexicography

8.1 Example 1: antonymous adjectives

8.2 Example 2: semantic prosody

8.3 Example 3: significant collocates

9. Pragmatics / text linguistics

9.1 Example 1: dispersion plots

9.2 Example 2: key words

10. Other areas of application

10.1 Example 1: first language acquisition: mean lengths of utterances

10.2 Example 2: second language acquisition: lexical frequency profiles

10.3 Example 3: simple data retrieval: accessing webpages

10.4 Example 4: advanced data retrieval: compiling a web-based corpus

10.5 Further suggestions for application

Appendix

References

Index

Author Bio

Stefan Th. Gries is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.

Related Subjects

1. Applied Linguistics
2. Corpus Linguistics