ABSTRACT
Unit 5 introduces corpora, which are collections of naturally-occurring language that can be used to investigate patterns of language use. Corpus software enables the identification of language use that can be difficult to discover through manual analysis alone. The unit describes some of the main aspects of corpus analysis, such as concordances, frequency lists, and word clusters. The next section focuses on corpus pragmatics, which brings the strengths of corpus linguistics to pragmatics and enables the use of language in context to be investigated on a wider scale. Some key studies are shown that use corpora to investigate epistemic stance, discourse-pragmatic markers, politeness expression, and modal particles. The unit then turns to how language is used in communities of practice and genres and describes how corpora enable research on patterns of language use in specific communities, such as academic or office environments, and on types of language use, such as emails, lectures, small talk, and tweets. It illustrates the theories by providing authentic examples from a variety of languages and types of media. Section B5 provides an example analysis, section C5 gives you the chance to analyse authentic texts, and section D5 introduces a reading by Lynne Flowerdew.
