International Journal of Corpus Linguistics - Volume 2, Issue 2, 1997

Against the background of some of the major linguistic problems which demand our attention and which should point to some badly-needed criteria, the brief history and structure of the Czech National Corpus is outlined. The points seen as open include differences between various languages in their degree of ex-plicitness, form-function relation, ellipsis, etc. It is argued that a more general and language-independent approach is necessary to handle, among other things, the multi-word units of the text; a general corpus maintenance and query system available to the increasing number of would-be users is required, too. The particular Czech solution, still being worked out and gradually implemented, is described in some detail.

This paper applies principal components analysis (PCA) to solve the problem of interpreting pre-existing corpus text categories for analysis of linguistic variation. The method is illustrated by constructing an index of the complex notion "formality " from PCA of a set of high-frequency wordform-based counts. The first principal component from this analysis acts as a broad formality index; a second principal component is tentatively identified as marking "concrete facts" versus "abstract discussion"'. Subsequently, text categories from the corpora are positioned on these textual dimensions, and selected categories are evaluated for internal consistency by comparing the distribution of texts across subcategories. Finally, suggestions are made concerning further developments and applications of the method used here, and its implications for the use of corpora in variation studies.

In recent years, great progress has been made in Chinese corpus processing. A fifty-million-word Chinese National Corpus project has been put into effect, and many automatic corpus processing programs have also been developed. In this paper, we will briefly introduce our work on constructing a large scale annotated corpus for Chinese grammatical research and developing a Chinese Corpus Multilevel Processing system—CCMP. First, we present our annotation scheme. Second, we discuss some basic methodologies for Chinese corpus analysis and propose a man-machine mutually dependent corpus processing model. Finally, we introduce the survey of our CCMP. We hope our work will give impetus to further research in Chinese corpus linguistics.

Various research centres and publishing companies all around the world have been developing corpus resources for many years, and there has been a growing awareness throughout the eighties of their importance to linguistic and lexicographic work. To give some idea of scale, the British National Corpus contains 100 million words, and its counterpart for Spanish—compiled by the Spanish Real Academia de la Lengua—will reach 100 million words at first and 200 million words in a second stage. However, little convincing research has been done in the direction of sample size—directly connected to a further topic: representativeness. We shall investigate here a related issue: Is it possible to predict the different word forms and lemmas of a given corpus? And if so, how? A positive answer to this question may contribute to decision making regarding some aspects of representativeness in given fields. We shall attempt further to find a reliable procedure to predict the total number of word forms (types) and lemmas in a specific corpus.