Between the Humanist and the Modernist: Semi-automated Analysis of Linguistic Corpora
Gregory Garretson, Mary Catherine O’Connor · 2007
This paper promotes a semi-automated approach to corpus studies of discourse phenomena and other phenomena that do not easily lend themselves to computational methods. The approach involves the following components: (a) use of “linguistic proxies” for the phenomena under study, which allow finding and coding tokens in a corpus, (b) automated methods of identifying tokens and adding codes to them, and (c) manual analysis of the tokens, aided by appropriate software tools. In particular, the use of alternating passes of automated and manual analysis is advocated. These methods are illustrated through description of three sub-studies within a project examining the English possessive alternation conducted by the authors. Several advantages of a semi-automated approach are presented, including (a) an improved cycle of exploratory analysis, (b) high levels of accuracy coupled with reasonable levels of speed and consistency, (c) increased explicitness in coding methodology, and (d) the creation of reusable tools.