Understanding Corpus Linguistics by Danielle Barth & Stefan Schnell, 2022

Abstract

Contemporaneously with the advances of technology as well as the advent of computers in language studies, we have witnessed a boom in the emergence of new books in Corpus Linguistics (see for example Dash & Ramamoorthy 2019;Paquot & Gries, 2020;Seoane & Biber, 2021). From among the informative books in this fast growing field of knowledge is the current one authored by Barth and Schnell in 2022. This work of scholarship has been organized in 11 chapters, which provide readers with state-of-the-art concepts of theory and practice for conducting research in the domain of Corpus Linguistics.The first two chapters function as an introduction in which the authors, succinctly, shed some light on the basic concept of corpus, its divergence from other approaches as well as its convergence with other usage-oriented fields within linguistics such as Sociolinguistics, Linguistics Typology and Language Change. The authors provide the reader with a definition of corpus and Corpus Linguistics, words, lexeme, type and token as well as some basic statistical concepts such as mode, mean and median. Later on, the authors make a distinction between structural context, syntagmatic context and constructional context in order to delineate the role of context in corpora.There are different types of corpora with specific composition criteria, which need to be delineated for the readers. In this regard, Chapter three, which is thematically divided into two parts, is a detailed description of the corpus composition criteria and typology. In the first part, the authors enumerate such concepts as size, balance, representativeness as well as authenticity and spontaneity as the core criteria for compiling a corpus. Furthermore, a subtle distinction is made between raw, primary