Doing Linguistics with a Corpus

Egbert, Jesse, Tove Larsson, et Douglas Biber. 2020. Doing Linguistics with a Corpus: Methodological Considerations for the Everyday User (Elements in Corpus Linguistics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108888790

 

Un petit livre bien écrit, clair et instructif. Voici mes citations préférées :

 

"we should always strive to choose minimally sufficiant statistical methods, meaning that we should choose tests that are no more no less sophisticated than the study design requires. (...) Even simple, seemingly straightforward statistical methods may lead to linguistically questionable conclusions caused by layers of abstraction between the data and the researcher" (p. 40).

 

"Statistical tests cannot replace linguistical analysis; they are, and should remain, tools that should assist the researcher in drawing linguistically valid conclusions" (p. 42).

 

"an ever-widening gap between the everyday user and the language contained in the corpus" (p. 70).

 

"end goal of turning corpus-based data into meaningful linguistic information" (p. 70).

 

"[i]nformation is born when data are interpreted" (Stallings, 1989: 2) (p. 71).

 

"The two sides of any corpus-based linguistically meaningful quantitative analysis: the statistical analysis and the qualitative interpretation (...) through consideration of actual texts" (p. 72).