To browse Academia. What can translations tell us about ongoing semantic changes? From among the informative books in this fast growing field of knowledge is the current one authored by Barth and Schnell in 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. In the past forty years, electronic corpora have come to prominence as a resource used by linguists. While their use remains a source of debate and controversy to this day see for example Newmeyer, ; Prodromou, ; Widdowson, their contribution to linguistics in general, and English linguistics in particular, as well as to language teaching, is now widely acknowledged.
Corpus tools have not only strengthened the position of descriptive linguistics, but have also enhanced theoretically-oriented linguistic research. This paper is an overview of the application of corpus linguistics methodologies, with special reference to the field of cross-cultural studies.
