Corpus Linguistics

Corpus linguistics is the study of language as expressed in samples (corpora) or "real world" text.
An approach to derive at a set of abstract rules by which a natural language is governed or relates to another language. Originally done by hand, corpora are now largely derived by an automated process. Corpus", derived from the Latin word meaning "body", may be used to refer to any text in written or spoken form.
In modern Linguistics this term is used to refer to large collections of texts which represent a sample of a particular variety or use of language that are presented in machine readable form. The scope of studies are the possible words, structures or uses in a language. Their probable occurrence in a language and the description and explanation of the nature, structure and use of language with particular matters such as language acquisition, variation and change. there are few types of corpora; written or spoken (transcribed) language, modern or old texts, texts from one language or several languages,texts from whole books, newspapers, journals, speeches,extracts of varying length. Corpus Linguistics is now seen as the study of linguistics phenomena through large collections of machine-readable texts: corpora.These are used within a number of research areas going from the Descriptive Study of the Syntax of a Language to Language Learning. the role of computer in corpus linguistics are to store huge amount of text, to quickly retrieve huge amounts of texts, to retrieve words, phrases or whole texts in context, to sort out linguistic items, to increase reliability in searching, counting and sorting linguistic items and to provide accurate probability of occurrence of specific linguistic items. An example of a software used for corpus linguistics is the concordancer.

Reflection

Corpus linguistics is very useful for making our research more precise in dealing with a huge amount of data and numbers. Other than that, it's contribution as a part of our preaching method is totally undeniable, as obviously from the invention of corpus for Arabic language that specifies on the content of the Qur'an. This method is opening our hearts to learn the content and structure of the Qur'an better, helping us to discover the true beauty hidden behind the Holy Book. from this, the non-Muslim and the non-Arabic native speaker could openly explore the Qur'an with better understanding of it.