Corpora in Applied Linguistics by Susan Hunston (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Corpora in Applied Linguisticsby Susan Hunston Qiao Zhou Hunston, Susan. Corpora in Applied Linguistics. 2nded. Cambridge UP, 2022. Pp. 341. ISBN 978-1-10842-509-4. Over the past few decades, corpus linguistics has revolutionized linguistic research and infused all aspects of applied linguistics with its continuous development. Twenty years after the first edition, the second edition of Corpora in Applied Linguisticsreflects this development, aiming to present an accessible and updated guidance of the field. There are altogether ten chapters in this book. Chapter 1 outlines the basics of corpus linguistics. As an approach to the study of language, corpus linguistics exerts a "transformative" effect (2) and explores both language itself and language use. After introducing three groups of key terms and some frequently used resources, the author reveals the possibilities of corpus research by illustrating the investigation of possible. Chapter 2 turns to the practice of designing a corpus, which has been facilitated by technological progress and changing views on language. Various types of corpora are compared, followed by four criteria for judging a corpus, namely, "size," "balance," "representativeness," and "comparability." While selecting texts, corpus compilers should consider "internal and external criteria" (37) and address the challenges brought about by different text sources, such as the transcription of spoken data. Once a corpus is designed and built, reading concordance lines becomes an essential qualitative method to learn from a corpus, which is discussed in chapter 3. Specifically, the author [End Page 702]demonstrates how to explore phraseology, meaning, semantic prosody, and pattern in concordance lines. For the last one, she expands on several pattern-based approaches, including Pattern Grammar, Corpus Pattern Analysis, and FrameNet. Besides, quantitative methods are also informative for exploring corpora. Chapter 4 expounds on the definition, calculation, and exemplification of the most basic quantitative concepts and techniques in corpus research, including those related to words and phrases such as frequency, keywords, and lexical bundles, and also those related to categories such as multidimensional analysis and corpus annotation. Further, chapter 5 focuses on more recent measures that can be divided into two types: the more sophisticated ones for already-investigated phenomena and the newly developed ones for clustering texts in line with internal criteria and grouping words that tend to co-occur. The following three chapters direct readers' attention to the application of corpus research. Chapter 6 focuses on the application in language learning. Corpora can be used to develop referential works for language learners, including dictionaries and grammar books. With learner corpora, the process and outcome of language acquisition can be easily investigated, which helps improve teaching materials. Learners can also use corpora to access authentic input for data-driven learning. Chapter 7 examines the application in discourse analysis. The value of corpora in complementing text-based approaches is prominent in the studies of academic discourse, news discourse, stylistics, and discourses of other fields such as health care and legal processes. By combining qualitative and quantitative methods, these studies indicate the indispensable role of corpora in discourse analysis. Many more applications of corpus research are displayed in chapter 8, including translation studies, forensic linguistics, natural language processing, social linguistics, among studies in other linguistic fields. Besides the application in various language-related fields, corpus linguistics also stimulates new perspectives in understanding language, which are explored in chapter 9 with two models of language: construction grammar and systemic-functional linguistics. The author reviews the "neo-Firthian" (255) approach to corpus data and explains the theoretical generalizations proposed by Sinclair and other scholars and their contributions to the two models of language. She also suggests and explains how researchers have to select proper approaches and models based on their needs. The concluding chapter exemplifies research procedures in corpus linguistics with a series of representative studies on COVID-19. The ways to select texts and compile corpora are depicted in detail. Moreover, the author shows how the top-down and bottom-up methods are employed in analyzing corpus data. This book is well-structured, with its content presented in a logical order. The author clearly explains the corpus-related concepts and discusses corpus research using concrete examples and recommending various resources, methods, and techniques...