Since historical linguistics relies on the analysis of texts from the past, it can be said to be evidence-based by nature.
The growing accessibility of large electronic text corpora over the past few decades has led to a renewed interest in historical and diachronic linguistics and the quantitative study of language change.

This course explores the theoretical and methodological basics of corpus linguistics, and offers practical instructions and exercises for working with historical and diachronic English corpora, and for collecting and preparing your own material for analysis with corpus-linguistic software tools (such as AntConc and TagAnt).

Topics covered in the more theoretical sessions and in the reading material include:
- What a corpus is
- Which (historical / diachronic) English corpora are available
- Types of corpora, e.g. online and offline, general and specialized, synchronic and diachronic, static and dynamic, etc.
- Defining and working with part-of-speech tagging, key words, collocates, regular expressions, etc.

Students will be expected to work on their own corpus-linguistic projects and present their first findings in class in the second half of the semester.

In addition to the weekly sessions, there will be joint poster presentations (live meeting) on:
Friday, 27 January 2023
Saturday, 28 January 2023
Participants will present their project in a three-hour panel on one of these dates. Registration and attribution of slots will take place on WueCampus.