Putting corpora into perspective. Rethinking synchronicity in corpus linguistics

Konferenzbeitrag

Empirical synchronic language studies generally seek to investigate language phenomena for one point in time, even though this point in time is often not stated explicitly. Until today, surprisingly little research has addressed the implications of this time-dependency of synchronic research on the composition and analysis of data that are suitable for conducting such studies. Existing solutions and practices tend to be too general to meet the needs of all kinds of research questions. In this theoretical paper that is targeted at both corpus creators and corpus users, we propose to take a decidedly synchronic perspective on the relevant language data. Such a perspective may be realised either in terms of sampling criteria or in terms of analytical methods applied to the data. As a general approach for both realisations, we introduce and explore the FReD strategy (Frequency Relevance Decay) which models the relevance of language events from a synchronic perspective. This general strategy represents a whole family of synchronic perspectives that may be customised to meet the requirements imposed by the specific research questions and language domain under investigation.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

Classification and Topics

• Subject: Korpus <Linguistik> ; Forschungsmethode ; Linguistik

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Belica, Cyril ; Keibel, Holger ; Kupietz, Marc ; Perkuhn, Rainer ; Vachková, Marie
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Liverpool : University of Liverpool
• (when): 2016-04-04

Further information

• URN: urn:nbn:de:bsz:mh39-47393
• Last update: 06.03.2025, 9:00 AM CET