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What is a corpus?
A corpus is a collection of texts stored in a database and may be quite small or very large.
The uses of a corpus
A corpus can be analyzed using software tools, much like those used to find key words on the Internet, but with greater sophistication. By evaluating the results of these searches, it is possible to see how language is really used, and to find answers to questions like these:
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What are the most frequent words and phrases in English? |
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Which tenses do people use most often? |
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What prepositions follow particular verbs? |
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How do people use words like can, may, and might? |
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How many words must a learner know in order to participate in everyday conversation? |
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| Materials developed with a corpus can therefore be more authentic and can illustrate language as it is really used. |
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| Learn more about the Corpus |
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In From Corpus to Course Book, Michael McCarthy discusses the fundamentals of corpus research and the ways this research has been used to develop Touchstone.
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In Teaching Vocabulary: Lessons from the Corpus, Lessons for the Classroom, Jeanne McCarten discusses the fundamentals of corpus linguistics and
how information about language derived from corpus research can be
used to inform vocabulary teaching.
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Explorations in Corpus Linguistics, by Michael McCarthy, is a collection of articles that successively challenge the notion of "fluency," underscore the
importance of word clusters, and provide a set of criteria for a grammar of spoken English.
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