What is a corpus? What is Corpus Linguistics?

A Corpus is a collection of texts (oral or written) produced by a proficient language speaker in a communicative situation made available in a machine readable form to allow linguistic analysis for different purposes. The first ever-made corpus was created in early 1960s and it was the Brown Corpus. It consisted of one million written words made available in an electronic format for use.

 in the image,  you can see Dr. Mark Davies of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, USA creating his Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)  which is a free, native, written, static, general corpus that consists of 450 million words (190,000 texts) dating from 1990 to 2012. He made other corpora (plural of Corpus) such as Wikipedia Corpus, Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), TIME Magazine Corpus and Corpus of American Soap Operas. 

Now that we know what is a corps we should know what is Corpus Linguistics (CL).  Corpus Linguistics is the study of field collected authentic language of native speakers.  It’s the study of field-collected authentic language of native speakers. Unlike sociolinguistics or psycholinguistics which are separate paradigms within linguistics, corpus linguistics is “a methodological basis for pursuing linguistic research” (Leech 1992: 105). It's a way of conducting linguistics. 

What makes corpus linguistics unique is its ability to deal with the daily authentic language of native speakers. It follows a descriptive approach to language that accepts all dialects of language as equal and rule-governed. Thus, you can search the use of any word or part of word to see how it's used by native speakers in real communicative situations.

If you are interested in spoken (taped) corpora you can visit Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English in the link below to listen to real people speaking language in authentic situations.

corpus linguistics is more popular in genre analysis where linguists analyze a genre such as acknowledgments, abstracts, introduction so that learners can know the conventions of writing these genres. However, corpus linguistics is also used in designing reference books like dictionaries and language teaching materials.all of this could be done using a concordancer ( an application that allows you to do various types of searches to a previously loaded number of texts or texts you load as your own corpus. You can get a free concordancer from Laurence Anthony's Website .

References:

Leech, Geoffrey (1992) Corpora and Theories of Linguistic Performance. In Svartvik (1992). 105–22.

For further reading:

From Corpus to Classroom: language use and language teaching By Okeefee, McCarthy & Carter

The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics  

Still searching :The artist's style block

Do you find yourself searching for you art style? For the things that will free you and give you wings to fly high in your art profession?! Then stand next to me and next to millions like us around the world.

When I ask myself what type of drawing/ painting I like most, the answer is always something with colors, yet even colors can bore you.

Every now and then I find myself stuck in thinking my art over and over. Should I copy others ? A big NO comes quickly to claim my mind. Should I paint abstracts (colors and no shapes sounds fun ) ? Well it's tempting but deep inside I find it worthless to paint things that needs to be explained. Should I draw in pencil more and practice so I overcome this recurring interval?  it sounds logical but deep down I hate pencil for anything but my personal incoherent scribbles.  Should I use color pencils?  It combines neatness and colors but there is no long life span. And the questions go on to my duties and study and other responsibilities.

What to do?
First, don't beat yourself up for thinking in this way because it will bring you no solution.
Second, think of future painting ideas instead of wasting your time thinking about your art block.
Third, remember that art is a state of chaos that an artist tries to tame.
Forth, try to schedule your art time in order to get yourself into the mood and leave all your worries behind.

in this concern i'm reminded of the words of Steve Jobs:

"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. "

Good luck with your art.
Wish me luck

Ola :)