Corpus Analysis is a semantic approach to analyzing a corpus – a set of methodically or arbitrary collected and electronically stored ‘real-life’ language samples such as speeches, magazine articles, and texting messages – with a goal to discern certain rules of language use, grammatical or lexical patterns, for instance, that are pertinent to a particular genre or type of text, serving as a valuable source for dialectology, sociolinguistics and other related fields. Corpora are investigated through the use of dedicated software. For example, softwares like Antconc, Google’s N-gram Viewer. Corpus analysis can be regarded as a sophisticated method of finding answers to the kinds of questions linguists have always asked. A large corpus can be a test bed for hypotheses and can be used to add a quantitative dimension to many linguistic studies. It is also true, however, that softwares do present us researchers with language in a form that is not normally encountered and that this can highlight patterning that often goes unnoticed. Corpus analysis has also therefore led to a reappraisal of what language is like. Corpus analysis comprises of terms such as Collocation, Concordance, Wildcards, Tokens and Lemmatization.
Collocation refers to a sequence or pattern of words that appear together or co-occur. Concordance represents a word or a phrase and its immediate context. In Corpus Analysis, concordance is used to analyse different use of a single word, word frequency and phrases or idioms. Tokens refer to an occurrence of an individual word which plays an important role in the so-called tokenization that involves the division of text or collection of words into tokens. This method is often used in the study of languages which do not delimit words with space. Lemmatization derives its form from the word lemma which refers to a set of different forms of a single word such as sight and sighted for example. Lemmatization refers to the process of grouping words that have the same meaning. Wildcards refer to special characters such as hyphens (-) or commas (,) which can represent a character or a word.
Here, we shall detail my application of various corpus analysis techniques on my chosen corpus of Violence in Video Games to investigate how violence maybe shaped across video games and to also check for any similarities or differences if any. Now we shall deal with the application of the techniques to the corpus under investigation here and what might be concluded from the results.
We shall begin with Collocations first on our study which is Violence in Video Games. As mentioned before Collocation is a key concept in corpus investigation, and one that will be examined closely in this essay, is that of collocation. Collocation refers to the regular and predictable co-occurrence of words in a text or an utterance. We characterise collocation as a ‘marriage contract between words’ and points out that the ‘marriage’ is stronger between some words than others.
One possible starting point in the study of collocation is the use of concordances, which have ‘been the major tool for accessing corpora’. Concordances are lines of text of a given length featuring the word under investigation (the node) in the centre of the page and its surrounding context (collocates) from which information can be drawn about patterns of relationships between words. The expanded context of concordance lines is key because, as it maybe noted that collocates are sometimes separated by intervening words.