Genbrug af korpora

Abstract

The word corpus has at least two meanings of interest to us; an older meaning: "A body or complete collection of writings", and a more recent one: "A limited collection of written or spoken material upon which a linguistic analysis is based". In this paper we show that the older meaning is approximately 2000 years old, while the more recent meaning is hardly 50 years old. Corpus in the old sense and corpus in the recent sense of the word establish two quite different scientific scenarios as for use and reuse. We assume that the concept of a text bank as a repository of texts in machine readable form will gain importance; from here the user can select and compose corpora of his own for specific and focused linguistic purposes. Such texts being more widespread and more easily accessible will give rise to the demand for precise declarations of corpora and for standardisation of corpora and of the electronic software tools used for the linguistic analysis of text corpora.