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Literary and Linguistic Computing Advance Access originally published online on March 17, 2008
Literary and Linguistic Computing 2008 23(2):163-180; doi:10.1093/llc/fqn004
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© The Authors 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of ALLC and ACH. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Corpus Tools and Methods, Today and Tomorrow: Incorporating Linguists’ Manual Annotations

Nicholas Smith

School of English, Sociology, Politics & Contemporary History, University of Salford, Manchester, UK

Sebastian Hoffmann

Department of Linguistics & English Language, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK

Paul Rayson

Department of Computing, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK

Correspondence: Nicholas Smith, School of English, Sociology, Politics & Contemporary History, University of Salford, Manchester M5 4WT, UK. E-mail: n.smith{at}salford.ac.uk

  Abstract

Today's corpus tools offer the user a wide range of features that greatly facilitate the linguistic analysis of large amounts of authentic language data (e.g. frequency distributions, collocations, keywords, etc.). However, these tools typically fail to address the fundamental need of the linguist to add interpretive information to a concordance or query result, by coding individual concordance lines for structural, functional, discoursal, and other features in a flexible way. The ability to add such qualitative data is indispensable to a fuller understanding of the phenomenon under investigation as it allows the linguist to produce more rigorous descriptions—and theories—about language in use.

Our article has two aims: first, to assess the merits and drawbacks of existing solutions, by surveying what can be achieved using state-of-the-art corpus tools and generic database software; second, we draw up a set of desiderata and recommendations for the incorporation of flexible encoding features into future corpus tools. We describe an initial step in this direction, with a recent enhancement to the BNCweb corpus analysis software. More generally, we hope our suggestions will lead to linguists and software developers working together more closely to ensure that the needs of the former are provided for by the available technology.


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