8 - Further Applications of Corpus Research

Summary

This chapter picks up a range of applications of corpus linguistics that have not been covered in Chapters 6 and 7. These are: applications of bilingual corpora in contrastive linguistics and translation; forensic linguistics, with a particular focus on authorship; the automatic extraction of information or opinion; the identification of ‘fake news’; and the various topics discussed under the head of sociolinguistics. In most cases the work described here uses the methods discussed in earlier chapters, both quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative techniques are particularly important in sociolinguistics, where the differential frequencies of items used by different social groups are important. In addition, applications such as information mining or sentiment analysis stray into computational linguistics and natural language processing, and illustrate both the common ground and the disparities between these approaches and corpus linguistics.