Corpus Linguistics
This website contains all materials for the Corpus Linguistics seminar taught at LMU Munich during the 2025 summer semester.1
Course schedule
Course description
This course covers theoretical and practical aspects of corpus linguistics, with an emphasis on hands-on learning. Students will examine language use in different domains, studying a range of linguistic concepts from domains such as lexis, morphology, and syntax, and investigate social variation, text type variation, and language change in these areas. The course will use data from different time periods and different genres (e.g. web corpora, academic prose, novels) to give students hands-on experience in analysing data and to cover a wide range of linguistic phenomena.
Throughout the course, students will learn how to use various corpus linguistic methods such as queries, frequency analysis, collocations, and text type analysis. By using tools like Sketch Engine and Excel, students will gain hands-on experience analysing real-world data and gain a deeper understanding of how these methods can be applied in different linguistic contexts. For example, we will analyse differences in the usage of words and constructions over time using the Gutenberg corpus, we will use Sketch Engine to analyse meaning change and variation, and Excel to create frequency tables and charts.
Core literature
Biber, Douglas, and Randi Reppen, eds. 2015. The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics. Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139764377.
McEnery, Tony, and Andrew Hardie. 2011. Corpus Linguistics: Method, Theory and Practice. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511981395.
O’Keeffe, Anne, and Michael McCarthy, eds. 2022. The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics. Second edition. Routledge Handbooks in Applied Linguistics. Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge.
Stefanowitsch, Anatol. 2020. Corpus Linguistics. Language Science Press. Language Science Press. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3735822.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this course, you will be able to:
- Apply core corpus linguistic methods to investigate language use
- Use Sketch Engine for advanced corpus analysis
- Understand frequency effects and distributional patterns in language
- Analyse linguistic variation across social groups and text types
- Study language change using diachronic corpora
- Design and conduct independent corpus-based research
Contact
Instructor: Quirin Würschinger
Email: q.wuerschinger@lmu.de
Office hours: By appointment
Footnotes
This website provides open access to course materials for educational purposes. All content is licensed under Creative Commons where applicable.↩︎