1. Intro to corpus linguistics: Data Driven Grammar
John Corbett & Wendy Anderson

2. This session Corpora and grammatical theories
The development of data-driven grammars
To tag or not to tag?
Exploring grammar without tags
Exploring grammar with tags
A few caveats

3. Key concepts in grammar
Saussure langue vs parole
synchronic vs diachronic focus
syntagmatic vs paradigmatic relations
Boas linguistic anthropology/fieldwork
Bloomfield Immediate Constituent Analysis
Fries importance of distribution over meaning
Chomsky competence vs performance
Halliday meaning, metafunctions of language
Sinclair data-driven grammar

4. Why use real data (and lots of it)?
Naturalistic language
Access to range of varieties & styles
(linguist not limited to own knowledge of language)
If corpus is well designed, we can generalise from it
Patterns emerge which cannot otherwise be detected

5. Early data-driven grammars
“The materials which furnished the linguistic evidence for the analysis and the discussions […] were primarily some fifty hours of mechanically recorded conversations on a great range of topics – conversations in which the participants were entirely unaware that their speech was being recorded. These mechanical records were transcribed for convenient study, and roughly indexed so as to facilitate reference to the original discs recording the actual speech.” (Fries 1952/57, p.3)

6. Early data-driven grammars
The Survey of English Usage, from 1959
Quirk et al. (1985) A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language.

7. Towards corpus-informed grammars
Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad and Finegan (1999) Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English.

8. “Through study of authentic texts, corpus-based analysis of grammatical structure can uncover characteristics that were previously unsuspected. For example, we have found that speakers in conversation use a number of relatively complex and sophisticated grammatical constructions, contradicting the widely held belief that conversation is grammatically simple.”
Introduction to Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (p.7)

9. Cambridge International Corpus
Over 1 billion words (and expanding)
Cambridge Grammar of English (Carter and McCarthy, 2006)

10. Tackling grammar with a corpus
Do you have access to a ‘raw’ or a tagged corpus?
Are you restricted to searching for individual words
or phrases?
Can you also search for Parts of Speech (PoS)?

11. Working with words/phrases
“He is not”
He is not He is not
a. He’s not b. He isn’t

12. He isn’t vs He’s not US English
Data from Cambridge International Corpus, reported in McCarthy, McCarten, Sandiford (2005)
form
frequency
a. He’s not
704
b. He isn’t 18
She’s not
476
She isn’t 15

13. He isn’t vs He’s not UK English
Data from British National Corpus
form
frequency
a. He’s not
1894
b. He isn’t
372
She’s not
1019
She isn’t
167

14. He isn’t vs He’s not US
He’s not / She’s not forms are chosen in 97-98% of instances in this corpus
Isn’t forms are chosen in 2-3% of instances UK
He’s not / She’s not forms are chosen in 84-86% of instances in this corpus
Isn’t forms are chosen in 14-16% of instances

15. He isn’t vs He’s not In conversation…
People use ’s not and ’re not after pronouns.
She’s not strict
They’re not nice.
Isn’t and aren’t often follow nouns.
My boss isn’t strict.
My co-workers aren’t nice.
Touchstone, McCarthy, McCarten and Sandiford 2005: 25

16. Automatic parsing

17. The perils of automatic parsing
CLAWS claims 96-7% accuracy in its automatic parsing of texts, depending on the texts analysed.
How worrying is that inaccurate 3-4%?

18. Working with POS: The BNC Tagset

19. Pattern Grammar
Susan Hunston and Gill Francis (2000)
Pattern Grammar

20. Using a parsed corpus to discover patterns: V + over + wh-

21. V + over + wh-

22. Pattern grammar V over + Wh-clause
heels while critics argue over the niceties of translation st
look at each other bicker over the poisoning of a dog. If th
be convinced to compromise over the structure of the competiti
hat in mind, as they fight over whether to support a rescue pa
er bridal showers and fuss over her trousseau. That’s her busi
the countryside. To haggle over prices and engage in sharp
so ill-bred as to quarrel over the last cucumber sandwich. ‘N

23. Some caveats about corpora
Corpora do not provide ‘negative evidence’
Corpora are not exhaustive, and may be skewed – focus on the typical
Corpora do not provide explanations – this is the linguist’s job!
Not all corpora are suitable for a particular research question
But corpora allow us to study language as it is actually used

24. Data-driven grammar – take home messages…
Corpora allow us to take account of naturalistic data
Focus on parole (or ‘performance’)
A return to the social as opposed to the cognitive