Weeks 5 to 8

5. (Feb 26th) Exploring parallel corpora 
  • Reading and preparation: http://www.llas.ac.uk/resources/gpg/1444 R. Salkie, “Using parallel corpora in translation” (2003) – don’t be put off by a section on French – he gets on to German/English sollen/should a bit further down.

Explore one of the corpora we have been looking at. Does it show similar patterns for sollen/ should as those identified by Salkie?

Please note: the amount of reading required for the next two weeks is greater, so get it now

In class:

  • We will examine the use of sollen and other modal verbs in German.
  • We’ll also learn to use a random number generator to help with sampling.

6. (March 5th) Corpus study of lexis; and word-formation (I)

Reading:

  • Mackinson, April. 2000. “Towards a corpus-based comparison of two journals in the field of business and management German.” In B. Dodd (ed.), Working with German Corpora (Birmingham: Birmingham University Press), pp.181-198.
  • Scott, Alan. 2009. The marking of gender agreement using derivational affixes in German and Dutch. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 21.1: 37-89

In class:

  • We’ll discuss these studies, and we’ll have a go at using the spoken language corpus together.

7. (March 12th) Corpus study of word-formation (II)

Reading:

  • Gupta, Piklu. 2000. “German be-verbs revisited: using corpus evidence to investigate valency.” In B. Dodd (ed.), Working with German Corpora (Birmingham: Birmingham University Press), pp.96-115.

In class:

  • We’ll spend some time discussing the reading, and will get practice categorizing data by looking at be-verbs.

By next week: you should have a good idea of what you want to investigate for your own project., i.e.: the general area, the precise research question, which corpora you are going to use.

8. (March 19th)

Reading:

  • Braber, Natalie, and Nicola McLelland. [submitted to Journal of Germanic Linguistics], Modal particles in Dutch and German: clustering and combining

In class:

  • We’ll examine the use of particles in one of the corpora. We’ll work on categorization and analysis of results; finding sensible ways to classify your data; how to present your data
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