Document Type

Assignment

Publication Date

Fall 2016

Published In

Anthropological Linguistics/Linguistic Anthropology

Abstract

In this assignment, students will learn basic methods in corpus linguistics, an emerging field at the intersection of humanities and quantitative social science. They will learn how to search large English language corpora (e.g., the 900 million word Cambridge International Corpus) to look for otherwise hidden patterns of language use. They will be able to track the emergence of new words, shifts in meaning in existing words, and note the obsolescence of some words. They will interpret their findings in light of how language usage reflects societal attitudes and social change.

Funding Agency

Swarthmore College Provost Office

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Comments

Professors K. David Harrison and Jamie Thomas were awarded a Digital Humanities Curricular Grant from the Provost's Office for use in their fall 2016 course, Anthropological Linguistics/Linguistic Anthropology (LING21, ANTH020N). The course syllabus, an archived version of the course Moodle page, assignment instructions, and a completed student example are made freely available here courtesy of the author.

Additional Files
LING21_CorpusLinguisticsAssignment_Anderson.pdf (1918 kB)
"Race, Age, and "Hipsterdom" in the COCA" by Celine Anderson '19
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Additional Files

LING21_CorpusLinguisticsAssignment_Anderson.pdf (1918 kB)
"Race, Age, and "Hipsterdom" in the COCA" by Celine Anderson '19

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