State-of-the-art Text Linguistics: Corpus-Analysis Tools. A Practical Demonstration

In recent years, electronic corpora and the computer programs specifically designed for their analysis have been extensively used for various types of text analyses and in a wide array of applied language-related studies. Small-sized to mega-sized digitalized collections of texts and corpus-analysis tools are used nowadays to support research in such fields as general linguistics, lexicography, grammar studies, terminology, translation studies, or literary studies. Corpus linguistics, the discipline that deals with corpora and corpus tools,has developed exponentially in the Western world, to the point that most language-related studies are nowadays based on its principles and tenets. Yet, because the development of corpus-analysis tools specifically designed to support the peculiarities of Romanian as a language would require insight from interdisciplinary teams of researchers, i.e. at least from the fields of linguistics and natural language processing, corpus linguistics is still a tentative branch of research in Romania. Based on a corpus of English news articles that approach information and communication technology topics this contribution aims to provide a practical demonstration of how the main types of corpus- analysis tools that are now available to Western researchers may be used to explore a collection of texts.