Corpus: meaning, definitions and examples

Etymology

• The word comes from Latin, meaning 'body', referring to a body of texts or works.
• In ancient Roman law, a corpus was a recognized body of law and regulation.
• The term began to be used in modern languages to refer broadly to any large collection of material.

Linguistics

• Linguists use corpora (plural of corpus) to analyze language patterns and usage in different contexts.
• Corpora can include everything from spoken dialogues to written literature, allowing for diverse study.
• Tools like word frequency counts and collocation analysis are frequently applied to corpus data.

Literature

• Famous literary works have been compiled into corpora to study themes, styles, and authorial techniques.
• The British National Corpus is one of the largest, gathering a comprehensive collection of modern English.
• Corpora allow researchers and students to examine how language evolves over time and across different cultures.

Technology

• In the realm of artificial intelligence and machine learning, corpora serve as crucial training data sets.
• Tools like natural language processing rely on large corpora to improve accuracy in language understanding.
• The growing field of data science frequently utilizes corpora to conduct sentiment analysis of online content.

Psychology

• Research using corpora has revealed insights into how language reflects emotional states and social dynamics.
• Psycholinguistics studies how individuals understand and produce language, often drawing from text corpora.
• Language patterns in corpora can illustrate cognitive processes that underpin communication and comprehension.

At #6,100 in frequency, this word belongs to advanced vocabulary. It's less common than core vocabulary but important for sophisticated expression.

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