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There are useful new sections on multilingual corpus alignment and paralled concordancing, which reflect the increasing importance of this type of corpus work ! The final chapter has been completely re-written ! Clearly delineated section headings, end of chapter summaries, study questions and comprehensive suggestions for further reading making it user-friendly for student use. Unfamiliar terminology (indicated in bold text) is explained by the end glossary or alongside in the text itself, and there are useful up-to-date appendices on corpora and software for the corpus research ! The book is attractively and well written, explaining complex issues clearly and succintly, and making effective use of illustrative diagrams, tables, and examples. Its tone is approachable and occasionally conversational, which will appeal to those looking for an accessible and, most importantly, a readable introduction to corpus linguistics ! McEnery and Wilson predict that corpus linguistics is moving with such momentum that another new edition may be required in a few years. If they maintain their 'fingers on the pulse' 'hands-on' approach to corpus studies, I expect the book will figure prominently on course reading lists for many years to come. Literary and Linguistic Computing praise for the first edition: Important [addition] to the fast growing literature in corpus linguistics, and should be read by anyone interested in utilization of large-scale corpora in linguistic research. Studies in the Linguistics Sciences There are useful new sections on multilingual corpus alignment and paralled concordancing, which reflect the increasing importance of this type of corpus work ! The final chapter has been completely re-written ! Clearly delineated section headings, end of chapter summaries, study questions and comprehensive suggestions for further reading making it user-friendly for student use. Unfamiliar terminology (indicated in bold text) is explained by the end glossary or alongside in the text itself, and there are useful up-to-date appendices on corpora and software for the corpus research ! The book is attractively and well written, explaining complex issues clearly and succintly, and making effective use of illustrative diagrams, tables, and examples. Its tone is approachable and occasionally conversational, which will appeal to those looking for an accessible and, most importantly, a readable introduction to corpus linguistics ! McEnery and Wilson predict that corpus linguistics is moving with such momentum that another new edition may be required in a few years. If they maintain their 'fingers on the pulse' 'hands-on' approach to corpus studies, I expect the book will figure prominently on course reading lists for many years to come. praise for the first edition: Important [addition] to the fast growing literature in corpus linguistics, and should be read by anyone interested in utilization of large-scale corpora in linguistic research.
Product Description
Corpus Linguistics has quickly established itself as the leading undergraduate course book in the subject. This second edition takes full account of the latest developments in the rapidly changing field, making this the most up-to-date and comprehensive textbook available. It gives a step-by-step introduction to what a corpus is, how corpora are constructed, and what can be done with them. Each chapter ends with a section of study questions that contain practical corpus-based exercises. * Designed for student use, with all technical terms explained in the text and referenced further in a Glossary * Examples are taken from existing corpora; detailed case study chapter included * Contains end-of-chapter summaries, study questions and suggestions for further reading * Updated reviews of new studies, areas that have recently come to prominence and new directions in corpus encoding and annotation standards * Detailed coverage of multilingual corpus construction and use * An in-depth historical review of computer-based corpora from the 1940s to the present day * Helpful appendices include answers to the study questions, up-to-date information on where corpora can be found, and the latest software for corpus research. "[An] important addition to the fast growing literature in corpus linguistics! should be read by anyone interested in utilization of large-scale corpora in linguistic research." Studies in the Linguistic Sciences, on the first edition
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Corpus linguistics has undergone a remarkable renaissance in recent years. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Corpus linguistics has undergone a remarkable renaissance in recent years. Read the first page
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is quite a good introduction to a rather enigmatic and interdisciplinary field. Corpus linguistics has been around for a while, but the appearance of computers a couple decades ago made genuinely large corpora a very real possibility for the first time. Despite this, there are very few books out there that deal with the topic, especially at an introductory level. It seems to be a field for experts on the move--linguists who develop an interest in statistics, or computer scientists who develop an interest in natural language. This book attempts to remedy this, and get new people interested corpus linguistics from an early stage.
The book is organised into seven chapters, each with a summary or conclusion, study questions and a further reading section. The first chapter, "Early Corpus Linguistics and the Chomskyan Revolution", deals with the pre-computer corpora that were used to study language. Then it goes on to defend corpus linguistics against Chomsky's strong opposition to the use of corpora in language study. The second chapter deals with the basics of what a corpus really is, and "What is in It?". This covers such topics as corpora versus general machine-readable text, encoding and annotation, and even the feasibility of multilingual corpora. Chapter 3, "Quantitative Data", discusses the fact that corpora open up the possibility of real quantitative analysis on language, but does not necessarily rule out qualitative analysis. The fourth chapter is my favourite: it is called "The Use of Corpora in Language Studies", and list the surprising variety of ways in which corpora have been and can be used. The next chapter covers corpora and natural language processing, with topics such as part-of-speech analysis, parsing and automated lexicography. Chapter 6 is a case study: the authors detail an analysis (using corpora, of course) of the hypothesis that some genres of writing represent a sublanguage (a closed set of a natural language). This chapter is interesting, and illustrates how corpora can be used, as well as introducing the reader to some real corpora. The final chapter is a view of what the authors foresee for the future of corpus linguistics. There are also a small glossary, two reference appendices (corpora mentioned in the text and software for corpus research), suggested answers to the problems, and good bibliography.
This book would be great as a text for a course in corpus linguistics, but it's also extremely accessible to any interested reader. The authors do not assume much knowledge of any type, but at the same time they do not condescend and over-explain. I highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to find out more about this cool field, and anyone who wants a general (but introductory) reference to it.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
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2 reviews
14 of 16 people found the following review helpful
good introduction to the topic
30 July 1998
Format:Hardcover
Even as a non-computational linguist, I found this book very readable. It covers a nice range of the relevant topics, and is very careful about defining terminology---a practice that other writers in computational linguistics would do well to follow. The book is unusually well-organized. Though there's not much depth of coverage of many topics, the references for further reading are very well selected, and do a lot to make up for this. The final chapter gives a very nice example of the application of empirical data to a theoretical question, and is worth the price of the book itself.
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Not useful as a textbook
28 Feb 2006
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I am a professor of linguistics, and was assigned to teach a general Corpus Linguistics course for the first time. This book was billed as a standard first textbook in the subject, suitable for uninitiated linguistics students. We have found that the book is chiefly an annotated bibliography of the field, and does not cover enough topics in sufficient depth to serve as a course textbook. I have had to supplement nearly every portion of the course with either additional readings or methodology that I provide on my own. The students find it dreadfully dry, it reads almost like a phone book, jumping lightly from one barely-treated topic to another without ever actually teaching a single thing.
Unfortunately, the publisher refused my efforts to contact them to get myself an advance copy. Now I know why this happened---by letting me see the book in advance, they would likely have lost a bunch of sales.
Unfortunately, the publisher refused my efforts to contact them to get myself an advance copy. Now I know why this happened---by letting me see the book in advance, they would likely have lost a bunch of sales.
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