Corpus facts & stats

Question 1

In linguistics, what is a corpus?

Accepted Answer

A large collection of texts used for study. Linguists build corpora, large structured collections of real texts, to study how language is used.

Question 2

If a writer's 'corpus' is discussed, what is meant?

Accepted Answer

Their complete body of work. A writer's corpus is the whole collection of their writings.

Question 3

In the human brain, what does the corpus callosum do?

Accepted Answer

Connects the left and right hemispheres. The corpus callosum is a thick band of nerve fibers linking the two halves of the brain.

Question 4

In large corpora of English text, which word appears most often?

Accepted Answer

The. Frequency counts of English corpora consistently rank 'the' as the most common word.

Question 5

What does a concordance show?

Accepted Answer

Each place a word occurs, with its surrounding text. A concordance lists every occurrence of a word along with the text around it.

Question 6

Zipf's law describes a word's frequency in a corpus as roughly proportional to what?

Accepted Answer

The inverse of its frequency rank. Under Zipf's law the second most common word appears about half as often as the first, and so on.

Question 7

In corpus tools, what does the abbreviation KWIC stand for?

Accepted Answer

Key Word In Context. KWIC displays each match of a key word centered in a line of its surrounding context.

The basics