Weekly outline
Writing term papers
Writing academic texts is something every student has to learn. Luckily, there is an abundance of tutorials how to write a term paper and you do not have to reinvent the wheel as most papers follow a relatively simple structure. This section contains a handpicked list of resources that help you structure and write your paper.
This page contains a collection of links related to the retrieval and handling of secondary literature (including links to tutorials and recommended software).
This page contains a collection of useful links.
Highlight: The Academic Phrasebank:Are you looking for idiomatic expressions that are commonly used in the register of research articles? Then the Academic Phrasebank is perfect for you! It contains a collection of phraseological units that are commonly used in academic English. These are grouped by communicative purpose and section of the research article.
Quick Links
Some of the links below require a VPN connection and a valid BA account.
Corpora
You can access the BNC with your BA-Account. No registration required.
In a first step, you are required to authenticate with your BA-Account. In a second step, you have to either login or sign up for an account for the corpus platform. You must use your @stud.uni-bamberg.de or @uni-bamberg.de e-mail when signing up. If you encounter any problems, please contact Fabian Vetter.
The SketchEngine is a commercial corpus interface which was primarily developed with the needs of lexicographers in mind. What's unique about SE is that it features some (sadly rather opaque) algorithms for investigating how words are used in context. The functions are similar to the collocations function in CQPweb, but more intuitive. You can use SE to access a wide range of corpora (including the BNC and parallel corpora such as OPUS).
If you require access, please contact Fabian Vetter or Julia Schlüter.
Freely accessible corpora at the University of Lancaster, including the BNC, BNC2014 and the Brown familiy.
A campus licence for COCA, COHA & GloWbE is available now. All students with a free user account for the corpora have advanced access rights when logging in on campus. This also works with a VPN connection from home.
Please note this works for only 30 students at a time, so please do not forget to log out once you're finished with your research.
Online questionnaires with LimeSurvey
LimeSurvey: Free online survey tool. The program is hosted by and the data is stored at the data center of the University of Bamberg.
Registration required. Please contact fabian.vetter@uni-bamberg.de
Software & tutorials for working with corpora and audio/video data
This section contains a selection of links with tutorials on how to find literature and use corpus tools such as the BNCweb, AntConc or Wordsmith Tools.
Corpora
- This is an open-resource self-learning package that is free to use for anyone interested in the application of corpora (large computer-readable text databases) to practical language problems in English.
Constructing queries
Transcription Tools
"EXMARaLDA is a system for working with oral corpora on a computer. It consists of a transcription and annotation tool (Partitur-Editor), a tool for managing corpora (Corpus-Manager) and a query and analysis tool (EXAKT)." (https://exmaralda.org/en/about-exmaralda/, 08.08.2023)
ELAN is a tool for annotating audio and video data.
Types of corpora
Here you'll find a selection of the most common English corpora. The corpora are grouped into four categories. Each subpage features short descriptions, links and other useful information. If you're looking for a specific corpus or need help, please contact Fabian Vetter.
The corpora in this group
- usually sample texts from many different registers in order to represent the language as it is used in one national variety.
- are synchronic, i.e. contain only material from one specific point in time
- contain present day English
- usually sample texts from many different registers in order to represent the language as it is used in one national variety.
- Old, Middle and Early Modern English corpora.
Specialised spoken corpora.
Specialised written corpora. Highlights: ICLE (International Corpus of Learner English), Oxford Text Archive (OTA), TIME Magazine Corpus of American English.
Encyclopedias, Databases, and other useful links
Encyclopedias
Atlases
"eWAVE is an interactive database on morphosyntactic variation in spontaneous spoken English mapping 235 features from a dozen domains of grammar in now 51 varieties of English (traditional dialects, high-contact mother-tongue Englishes, and indigenized second-language Englishes) and 26 English-based Pidgins and Creoles in eight Anglophone world regions (Africa, Asia, Australia, British Isles, Caribbean, North America, Pacific, and the South Atlantic; see here for a list)." (https://ewave-atlas.org/, 09.08.2023)
- "The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) is a large database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials (such as reference grammars) by a team of 55 authors." (https://wals.info/, 09.08.2023)
Dictionaries
The Oxford English Dictionary is the accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past. It traces the usage of words through 2.5 million quotations from a wide range of international English language sources, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts and cookery book.
Other
Tips & tricks for using MS Word in linguistics. This author explains how you can draw and integrate phonetic symbols, syntax trees or glosses in your thesis.
A mailing list for linguists.
Data Visualization
More coming soon.Lukas Sönning created several templates for MS Office with which you can easily create professional visualizations for your data. The templates can be found in his OSF repository: https://osf.io/v37pw/.
Statistics
More coming soon.
Vaclav Brezina created an interactive self-learning course on statistics for corpus linguistics. No background knowledge on statistics required.