The relevance of corpuses has increased greatly over the last hundreds of years. From small, specialized corpuses focused on religion to massive corpuses of whole languages, e.g., used for dictionaries or vocabulary lists in language classrooms, their areas of application cover a wide range now.
In the first part of the course, we will have a look at history, purposes and composition of corpora, before starting to focus on empirical examples. Each of you will create an own, individual corpus based on your interests and we will analyse it step by step over the term with focus on linguistic peculiarities. For this, we will use common software tools like AntConc or MaxQDA, which will be made available without cost. Your research findings are subsequently presented at the end of the term.
In order to provide you with a solid introduction into academic writing, we will also cover essential skills like researching literature, citing correctly and working with hypotheses during the winter.

The exam is in form of a portfolio. Course requirements include: submission of several smaller tasks with regard to academic writing and analysis steps, your case study presentation and a short term paper (eight pages). Please note that the course will be accompanied by several reading assignments in the first weeks.

This course will take place on Thursdays from 4:15 to 5:45 pm. It starts as an in-person class, but will be transformed to an online setting if the Covid situation worsens again.

Requirements for admission (“Zulassungsvoraussetzungen”): Einführung in Grundbegriffe und Methoden der Linguistik