MSc Computational and Corpus Linguistics

This course unit offers a concise introduction to linguistics with a view to its application in the design of computational linguistic tools and the analysis of actual texts (“corpora”). It introduces key terms and concepts at all levels of language structure – sounds, word and sentence grammar, lexical and grammatical meaning, and discourse – with some critical discussion on different theoretical approaches and competing analyses where these are relevant in computational and corpus linguistics. The concepts will be introduced mainly with reference to English, but other languages will be included to illustrate potential cross-linguistic differences. There will be ample opportunities for students to practice the application to data sets and to discuss additional languages that they know.

The unit aims to:

• Provide students with no prior background in linguistics with a foundational understanding of key terms and concepts in phonology, grammar, meaning and discourse, to enable them to work with corpora and to design computational tools for language analysis;
• Provide opportunities to analyse natural language at the level of sounds, words, sentences and discourse, as applied to diverse languages
• Enable students to formulate linguistically-informed hypotheses for corpus and computational research;
• Enable students to critically review certain theoretical approaches that inform corpus linguistics and computational linguistics.

1. Phonetics / phonology

2. What’s a word / Morphology

3. Semantic relationships between lexical items (antonyms, synonyms; hypero/hyponyms); polysemy

4. Parts of speech and tagging: lexical items

5. Parts of speech and tagging: grammatical morphemes

6. Syntax: Constituency (simple clauses); constituency tests

7. Syntax: Dependency (simple clauses)

8. Syntax: complex sentences

9. Anaphora and co-referentiality

10. Coherence in discourse (e.g. connectives; use of rhetorical relations)

11. Revision and applications

11x 2 hour synchronous workshop (delivered content combined with consolidation through data work, in approximately 50:50 proportion)

11x 1 hour synchronous seminar: data problems (includes feedback on and addressing issues with weekly formative quizzes

Students will be able to: 

• undertake analyses of words in terms of their (distinctive) speech sounds (phones /phonemes) and distinguish between sounds and their representation in writing
  analyse words in terms of their smallest meaningful units (morphemes)
• identify semantic relationships (e.g. synonymy, hyponymy) between content words
• classify content words into parts of speech (e.g. verb, noun) depending on their distribution in a clause, and compare the parts of speech tagging of selected words in different corpora
• identify words or affixes with different types of grammatical meaning (e.g. prepositions, articles, tense markers, etc.) and compare their tagging in different corpora
• perform tests to identify constituents (phrases) within clauses (e.g. noun phrase, prepositional phrase) and to identify types of subordinate clauses; also to distinguish grammatical constituents (constructions) from frequent and conventionalised sequences of words (collocations)
• identify expressions which refer to the same extra-linguistic entity in discourse (coreferential expressions; anaphora), as well as other strategies for creating and interpreting coherence in discourse (e.g. sentence connectives like ‘therefore’; use of rhetorical relations such as elaboration)
   

Students will be able to: 

• apply alternative analyses to grammatical structures depending on the theoretical model involved
• formulate basic linguistic research questions and testable hypotheses
• develop a basic awareness of cross-linguistic differences
   

Students will be able to: 

• test linguistic hypotheses using corpora
• perform and explain contrastive linguistic analyses of different languages
• identify and create coherence relations in texts of all types

Students will be able to: 

• employ data analysis and categorisation skills
• perform linguistic analyses relevant for everyday settings (e.g. teaching, translation, cross-cultural communication)
   

Oral and Written feedback will be provided on the group project. 

Oral Feedback will be provided on the mid-term quiz. 

Written feedback will be provided on the final exam.

Börjars, Kersti, and Kate Burridge. 2019. Introducing English Grammar. Third edition. Routledge. Hazen, Kirk. 2015. An Introduction to Language. John Wiley.

Kroeger, Paul. 2022. Analyzing meaning: An introduction to semantics and pragmatics. Third edition. (Textbooks in Language Sciences 5). Berlin: Language Science Press.

Leech, Geoffrey. 2022. A Glossary of English Grammar. Edinburgh University Press.

Müller, Stefan. 2023. Grammatical theory: From transformational grammar to constraint-based approaches. (Textbooks in Language Sciences 1). Berlin: Language Science Press. 

Osborne, Timothy J. 2019. A Dependency Grammar of English : an Introduction and Beyond. John Benjamins.

Payne, Thomas E. 2006. Exploring Language Structure : a Student’s Guide. Cambridge University Press. 

Weisser, Martin. 2016. Practical Corpus Linguistics : an Introduction to Corpus-Based Language Analysis. First edition. Wiley Blackwell.