This course will introduce students to the methods and issues involved in corpus linguistics. It aims to demonstrate the practical use of online corpora to explore questions asked by scholars of language, and to address some of the central issues raised by corpus design and analysis. Students will familiarize themselves with the research use of online corpora and the construction and analysis of original corpora using freeware concordance tools. At the same time, the classes will consider various aspects of language analysis concerning lexis and grammar, and questions of language variation and change.

CILO-1: Summarise and explain ideas and practices associated with analyzing corpora from existing texts. CILO-2: Demonstrate analytical effort on texts to understand particular language use. CILO-3: Demonstrate the principles associated with the corpus linguistics approach.