Littera Deusto

Modern Languages, Basque Studies and Humanities

What is a corpus?

mayo 12th, 2009 · No hay Comentarios

The word corpus derived from the Latin word meaning body. It was used to refer any text in spoken or written form.

Nowadays, a corpus is a large collection of samples of a language held on a computer. The samples can come from anywhere the language is used in speech and in writing. A corpus is used to understand more about a language. A corpus studies how people use that language when they write and when they speak.

Here we include an exercise that help us to understand better what a corpus’ aim is [1]
Materials that appear in a corpus are more authentic and can illustrate language as it is used. A corpus is useful both to teacher and students. Teacher can teach their students as native speakers. A corpus offer a spoken language that is used by native speakers and it contains words and expressions of the different variations of a language. For instance, the Spanish spoken in Spain and the Spanish spoken in America. Teachers can also teach the most commonly used words and the current contemporary language. The materials of the corpus are a reflection of real usage in real contexts. So, the corpus helps us to know the different uses of a word or an expression in the different places where that language is spoken. Moreover, a corpus reflects the spoken and the written English and teachers can teach the differences between both. The corpus helps to know more about social communication.
The corpus is very useful for students too. Dictionaries and books are based on the corpus of the language. A corpus makes us possible to know what hundreds of native speakers or writers have said or have written. The examples are interesting because students learn real and current expressions and they are confident that they are learning useful expressions.

Many publication are based on Corpus. Most of them are addressed to language students.

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