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THE LINGUISTICS STUDENT’S HANDBOOK 86
which can be recorded but which involve rather less unnatural production of
speech than is provided in reading tasks: role playing, doing a ‘map task’ (where
two participants are given partial maps showing some of the same features and
are asked to reconstruct some route across the map, without seeing each other’s
maps), and similar exercises. The difficulty here is often to create a meaningful
task which will produce the requisite language behaviour, but the data produced
can be very valuable.
Electronic corpora
While it is possible to create one’s own electronic corpus and to annotate it in
any way desired, it will be assumed in what follows that the use of electronic
corpora involves the analysis of one of the standard corpora now more and
more readily available. The great benefit of corpora is that somebody has
already collected a number of texts, probably with some attempt at representativeness,
and has already done the transcription in the case of spoken texts.
Electronic corpora thus provide some of the best features of literary and nonliterary
texts and sound recordings, with the added advantage that they are relatively
easy to search (or, in most cases, are easy to search as long as the search
can be carried out in terms of specific lexical material). Some corpora have also
been tagged, i.e. marked with information about the word classes of the items
in the texts. The best corpora of spoken language can now link the transcriptions
direct to the sound files and to the files containing speaker information,
so that it is possible to search for an occurrence of /e/ before /l/ spoken by a
woman. Where part-of-speech tagging has been manually checked it is more
useful than when it has been done entirely automatically, in which case the
analyst has to be aware that there may be errors in the labels assigned. A very
few corpora have also had the syntactic constructions in them analysed and
marked. As well as those collections of texts put together specifically for the use
of linguists, there is a growing number of electronically searchable bodies of
text, which may also be of value. Many newspapers are now republished retrospectively
on CD, and there are collections of literary and non-literary texts
from various periods. The largest body of electronically searchable text is provided
by the world-wide web. Ironically, given that one of the problems with
newspapers as sources of data is that there may be editorial interference, one of
the major problems with the web is that there is no editorial control, and that
spelling mistakes and syntactic errors abound. For example, a query on few
person will not only turn up reference to a few person-hours and the like, but will
also provide examples such as Is it possible that a few person participate using the
same computer? Also, a search of the web may turn up several occurrences of the
same document, and thus apparently inflate the occurrence of a particular
structure. Despite such problems, the web is an invaluable source of data on