Using corpus analysis software to analyze specialized texts (week5)

In this week, I learnt about using corpus analysis software to analyze specialized texts. After that, I can summarize the knowledge as follows :

1.What is a corpus?

A corpus can be generally defined as a collection of naturally-occurring texts in a computer-readable format which can be retrieved and analyzed using corpus analysis software.

2. Sources of language corpora

You can subscribe to a large corpus provider such as the British National Corpus (BNC)

-        http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/

or use web concordancing

-        http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk

or compile own corpora and analyze data using corpus analysis software

-        Antconc’(http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/software.html

3. Designing a specialized corpus 

You have to design a specialized corpus as follows:

- Corpus size

- Text extracts vs. full texts

- Number of texts

- Medium

- Subject and text type

4. Sources of specialized texts

-printed materials

-word document texts

-CD-ROMs

-Texts on the web

-Online databases