Tuesday 9 April 2013

WEEK 8: SUMMARY AND REFLECTION ON CORPUS LINGUISTICS






REFLECTION ON CORPUS LINGUISTICS


Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics, Grammar, Syntax, Language Acquisition, Language Teaching, Lexicography, Psycholinguistics, Semantics, Sociolinguistics and Stylistics are some of the different areas of language study that make use of corpus in the research which help these branches of language study to improve and develop or to solve problem related to these fields. The study related to corpus is known as corpus linguistics. Corpus linguistics deals with corpora which enable the linguist to study the real language used by real people. Corpora consist of a large amount of authentic data which are real language used, whether it is in spoken or written form presented in machine readable form. The authenticity and large amount of data offer the reliability and validity of the corpus, thus lead to the reliability and validity of the research. 

The computer made the task easier as this technology can handle the huge corpus easily and accurately. We agree that technology and computer advancement have a lot of benefit to offer in linguistic study as it provides the linguists the easier way to collect, save, organize, retrieve, calculate and analyze the corpus. Computer makes the result obtained more reliable as computer is mistake free compared to human being. By knowing the existence of this corpus linguistic, we have broadened our knowledge on different branches of language studies that we can set interest in and use corpus for our future research.

In addition to that, as mentioned in our post on Islamization of Discourse Analysis, we know that Discourse Analysis is actually can  shape the perception of people about Islam and vice versa. Hence, corpus linguistics can be used to examine any type of discourse related to Islam. For instance, through research in corpus linguistics, we can know how Islam and Muslim are being represented in mass media such as newspaper and television .We know that the mass media can influence our thoughts. Thus, many anti-Islam people use mass media to spread the false belief about Islam. We can find that they often link Muslims with terrorism and fundamentalism through their discourse. (Paul Baker, 2012).  Therefore, because we have already known the false perceptions of Western people about Islam, we can use this opportunity to clear up all the misconceptions for instance by exposing the true knowledge of Islam itself.

Besides, corpus linguistics also can be used in analyzing the Islamic writings by looking at the language used. Hence, we will know how people use language to spread the teachings of Islam. It also allows us to compare all the Islamic writings to improve our knowledge of Islam. After all, even corpus linguistics can bring a great contribution to Islam. Thus, we must not forget that any branch of knowledge can be used to promote Islam to the people.

REFERENCE

Baker, P. (2012, May 25). Taylor & Francis Online. Retrieved April 12, 2013,







       

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