The seminar will present corpus analysis as a set of techniques for analyzing discourses in a number of areas such as green and refugee discourses, Freshman writing and other types of academic writing. It will combine some corpus theory with a strong hands-on grounding in the use of corpus tools to collect and interpret relative frequencies of words and phrases, KWIC concordance displays, collocations, keywords, and ngram lists (these will all be explained). We will cover downloading and tagging texts from the web. Students should bring a laptop to class; we will download some free software and corpora. Final projects can be designed around projects students have already identified or around one of the issues that will arise in the course.

Texts: Paul Baker. Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. Continuum: 2006.
Michael Hoey, Michaela Mahlberg, Michael Stubbs and Wolfgang Teubert, Text, Discourse and Corpora: Theory and Analysis. Continuum, 2007.