The aims of the module are to:

•Equip students with a practical understanding of theory and methods in corpus linguistics
•Equip students with practical skills in the use of computational linguistic technologies for linguistic research
•Develop students’ understandings of language in use through the application of corpus and computational linguistic methods and tools
•Develop students’ abilities in carrying out hands-on, practical studies of English corpora using methods and tools from corpus and computational linguistic

(LO1) Students will demonstrate a critical understanding of a representative range of Corpus Linguistic theory and methods.

(LO2) Students will gain a range of digital skills and be able to use – and reflect upon the use of – a range of appropriate software, tools, and data for corpus linguistic research.

(LO3) Students will exhibit an ability to effectively apply appropriate Corpus Linguistics theory, methods, and tools in systematic critical analyses of linguistic data.

(LO4) Students will demonstrate an ability to design and deliver an independent research project.

(S1) Students will gain practical research skills to retrieve and handle information from a variety of sources.

(S2) Students will gain digital skills and practical experience in the use of a variety of computational tools for linguistic analysis.

(S3) Students will gain the ability to clearly and coherently articulate insights generated from critical analysis of complex quantitative and qualitative linguistic data.

The module is divided into 2 parts:

•During part 1 you will explore the origins and historical development of CL as a distinct field of linguistic enquiry. You will explore and apply concepts central to Corpus Linguistic research like concordance, collocation, and keywords through hands-on investigation of different corpora using tools like CQPWeb, WMatrix, the corpus.byu.edu suite, Sketch engine, AntConc, etc. Sessions will focus on methods of analysis (e.g. frequency, collocation) and their related statistics (e.g. type/token ratio, log-likelihood/MI3). This part of the module will give you a practical grounding in the theory, methods, and tools required for a good understand of Corpus Linguistics and the assessment
•In part 2 of the course you will be introduced to some more advanced techniques for searching and analysing corpora, and will broaden your understanding of the field through exploring applications of Corpus Linguistics to research in linguistic s (in areas including discourse analysis, forensic linguistics, sociolinguistics, semantics, and pragmatics) and beyond (in/across various fields, including, media and communication, cyber security, computational linguistics, law, sociology, and psychology)
The module will typically cover basic theory and methods in corpus linguistics (e.g. frequency, distribution, collocation, concordancing, n-grams), approaches to corpus construction (incl. corpus tagging and annotation for advanced analyses), data literacy and presentation, and a wide variety of applications of corpus linguistic research to investigate linguistic and social questions across a broad range of contexts.

This module will be taught by
• 1 x weekly 2-hour workshop
• 1 x weekly 1-hour lab-based practical tutorials

Self-Directed Learning Hours will likely involve students doing preparatory reading/research specific to each week of the module, carrying out further independent research and preparing for/working on assessments.