Postgraduate Course: Corpus Linguistics (MSc) (LASC11078)
Course Outline
| School | School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course covers the ways in which electronic text databases (corpora) can be used to do research in linguistics and language studies. Corpora can show the distribution of a word or construction, which can tell us about the structure or function of that item, and/or the way it patterns stylistically, socially, regionally, or historically. |
| Course description |
Students will be exposed to a range of different corpora (spoken, written, historically and socially differentiated, single genre and multi-genre),and encouraged also to think of the internet as a corpus. We will look at the ways in which electronic texts are adapted for linguistic research through tagging and mark-up. Most sessions will be held in the teaching lab where students will learn to use concordancing software to extract and manipulate data.
We will not only make use of collocational data but also word frequency lists, which can be used to estimate vocabulary size and to make inferences about how words are remembered and parsed by speakers.
The course assumes that students have not worked with electronic corpora before, and provides a basic introduction to corpora and how to use them. It builds on knowledge that students could be expected to have of, for example, syntax or discourse, and demonstrates how they can pursue research in this area with a new methodology.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2015/16, Available to all students (SV1)
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Quota: None |
| Course Start |
Semester 2 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Lecture Hours 27,
Feedback/Feedforward Hours 1,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
168 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
Presentation (20%) and One 4,000 word essay (80%)
Presentation: submission of a hard copy Powerpoint presentation and brief commentary
Part A Assignment Deadline:
Essay Assignment Deadline:
Maximum Word Count: 4000 words
Essay Return Date: |
| Feedback |
The Course Organiser will meet students in Weeks 3 and 4 to discuss and advise on possible topics for their presentation and assignment.
The Course Organiser will provide feedback (the week immediately after their presentations) so that they can use the feedback to improve/shape their research paper.
Comments provided on submitted assessments |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- have an understanding of the construction of different corpora and what kinds of data they are able to provide
- have a broad sense of the applications of electronic corpora
- develop and refine a query to extract data from a corpus
- present and discuss corpus results
- use corpus data to answer questions about vocabulary, morphology, syntax, pragmatics, sociolinguistic variation and language change
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Additional Class Delivery Information |
Attend all lectures as scheduled |
| Keywords | electronic corpora,concordancing,collocation,word frequency |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Brona Murphy
Tel: (0131 6)51 6408
Email: |
Course secretary | Miss Toni Noble
Tel: (0131 6)51 3188
Email: |
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