ABSTRACT
The compilation and investigation of digital corpora has fundamentally transformed our knowledge of the English language and other areas of humanities. The first half of this chapter presents a classification of different types of corpora and tracks the growth and influence of written corpus research in areas such as diachronic linguistics and the development of English language teaching materials.
The second half of the chapter presents two small-scale studies using written corpora. The first explores how the term ‘humanities’ is used in ready-made, freely available corpora, and thus illustrates what corpus research can tell us about the nature of humanities. We approach the term ‘humanities’ as one that does not have a fixed meaning, but instead is a semantic shifter whose sense and referent(s) change according to the contexts in which it is used. This makes it a prime candidate for corpus linguistic investigation. In contrast, our second study focuses on three specialist correspondence corpora and demonstrates how they can be prepared and annotated to enable a series of comparative analyses that lead to a hypothesis about the nature of correspondence genres.
These two studies use a range of written corpora and show the sort of information that can be gleaned from them. The studies themselves illustrate how written corpora can be used to provide evidence to enhance our understanding of specific concepts and terms in humanities, as well as how digital collections of texts can be assembled and analysed for use as evidence in humanities research.
