This book provides detailed studies in one of the fastest growing areas of linguistics - corpus analysis - and shows how computers can be used to reveal culturally significant patterns of language use.
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This book explores one of the fastest growing areas of linguistics - corpus analysis - and shows how computers can be used to reveal culturally significant patterns of language use.It is designed to introduce students to basic methods of corpus analysis, with a clear progression from the use of concordances in analysing individual texts, to more complex quantitative analyses of large text corpora.Copious authentic examples from millions of words of corpus data and from many types of naturally occurring texts - school books, courtroom language, speeches by politicians and other public figures, sexist language - are analysed to show how patterns of language convey attitudes, presuppositions and points of view.The author gives his work a systematic theoretical basis in an authoritative account of the principles of British text analysis from the 1930s to the 1990s, especially in work by Firth, Halliday and Sinclair - a tradition of social linguistics which shows how important it is to base linguistic descriptions on adequate attested data.
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