corpus linguistics

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

the study of language based on large collections of authentic texts — corpora — using computational methods to identify patterns of usage, frequency, collocation, register variation, and change over time that would be impossible to observe through introspection or small-scale analysis; corpus linguistics emerged as a systematic approach in the 1960s with the Brown Corpus of American English, a one-million word sample of written American English that became the foundation for computational linguistic analysis; major corpora now include the British National Corpus (100 million words), the Corpus of Contemporary American English (1 billion words), and Google Books Ngrams (hundreds of billions of words spanning centuries); corpus linguistic methods include frequency analysis, keyword analysis, concordance analysis, and collocation analysis to identify the words that characteristically co-occur with a target word; corpus linguistics has contributed to lexicography — modern dictionaries are built on corpus evidence rather than prescriptive judgements — and challenges nativist linguistic theories by grounding linguistic description in actual usage data rather than idealised grammatical competence

Examples

• Corpus linguistics revealed that 'decimate' is now predominantly used to mean 'destroy most of' rather than its historical meaning of 'reduce by one-tenth'.
• The diachronic corpus analysis showed that the phrase 'social media' appeared only in the 2000s and rose rapidly in frequency after 2007.