Quantitative Corpus-Based Research: Much More Than Bean Counting
Douglas Biber, Susan Conrad · TESOL Quarterly · 2001
* The first language corpora were compiled decades ago (e.g., the Brown Corpus was begun in 1962; see Francis & Kucera, 1979), and many corpus-based linguistic studies have been conducted since that time (see Altenberg, 1991, for a bibliography). Some of the earliest uses of corpus linguistics were for applied purposes, especially the compiling of dictionaries (see, e.g., Sinclair, 1987). More recently, an increasing number of corpus-based studies have made important connections with TESOL. In fact, in the past 4 years three contributions to TESOL Quarterly have used corpus-based techniques (Conrad, 2000; Coxhead, 2000; Hughes & McCarthy, 1998). The unifying characteristics of corpus-based research include the use of a large, representative electronic database of spoken or written texts, or both (the corpus), and the use of computer-assisted analysis techniques. (For an introduction to corpus linguistics, including the importance of corpus design, see Biber, Conrad, & Reppen, 1998; Kennedy, 1998.)