ABSTRACT
Corpus linguistics began as a field heavily oriented to English, but its methods were soon applied to other languages. Technical problems delayed this development for many Asian languages, but since c. 2000, the resolution of that issue has led to increased application of corpus-based methodologies to the study of these languages. This chapter presents a review of the consequent advances in corpus linguistics for Asian languages, illustrating how the adoption of corpus-based approaches has tended to lag behind advances in the allied field of natural language processing and demonstrating how progress has been uneven not just across languages but also in terms of what sub-fields of corpus linguistics have received attention for particular languages. We survey subdisciplines including corpus construction, lexicography, grammar, semantics, pragmatics (including collocation-oriented research), discourse analysis and language teaching – identifying languages for which each area is relatively more advanced and exemplifying the research undertaken to date.
