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Seminar: The Corpus and Linguistic Research Presented by Dr Alex Chengyu Fang

Date: 17 May 2006, Wednesday
Time: 4:30pm - 6:15pm
Venue: Lai Chau Pui Ngong Lecture Theatre, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Corpus linguistics covers a wide range of linguistic endeavours. In this talk, I aim to give a brief description of the development of linguistic corpora. I shall first of all present a cursory outline of corpus-based linguistic studies before the advent of the computer, from the Thorndik word list to the London-Lund corpus of spoken English. I will then describe the development of some of the major computerised linguistic corpora that have been extensively exploited in linguistic research. These include the well known corpora such as Brown, ICE, and BNC. Non-principled text collections and archives will not be discussed in this talk. The second part of the talk will be a description of research in the adverbial clauses in contemporary British English based on the ICE corpus. Previous studies have strongly argued for a preferred use of adverbial clauses in speech. Corpus evidence shows, however, that writing makes far more extensive use of such clauses than speech. This difference can be observed not only between speech and writing but also between prepared and unprepared samples in the corpus, suggesting a strong correlation with degrees of textual elaboration.