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Linguistics & Grammar vocabulary · Core Concepts

Corpus

Meaning in linguistics & grammar, with examples

/ˈkɔːpəs/nounCommon term

In linguistics & grammar, corpus means: A large, organized collection of real written or spoken texts, stored on a computer and used to study how language is actually used; the plural is corpora.

In Turkish: derlem, korpus

How it is used

Corpus linguistics uses software to find frequencies, collocations and concordance lines. Well-known examples are the British National Corpus and COCA; Turkish has the Turkish National Corpus (TNC). Modern learner dictionaries are based on corpus data.

Example sentences

  1. A quick corpus search shows that 'make a decision' is far more common than 'do a decision'.

  2. We built a learner corpus of 500 essays written by Turkish university students.

Common collocations

  • corpus linguistics
  • learner corpus
  • spoken corpus
  • corpus data
  • corpus-based
  • lexiconAll the words and meaningful word parts of a language, or the mental store of words a speaker knows, together with their meanings and how they are used.
  • discourseLanguage in use beyond the single sentence, such as conversations, lectures or newspaper articles, and the way these stretches of language are organized and connected.
  • linguisticsThe scientific study of human language: how sounds, words and sentences are structured, how meaning works, and how language is learned, used and changes over time.
  • polysemyThe situation in which one word has several related meanings, such as 'head' meaning a part of the body, the leader of a group or the top of a page.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Core Concepts

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