What is a corpus?

The word “corpus” was derived from Latin, meaning “body”. The Online Etymology Dictionary suggests the sense of “body” came around in the mid-15th century. It was later used to refer to “a body or a collection of things”.

In modern linguistics terms, the word corpus has been used to refer to a body of text, as Reppen (2010) defines, “a corpus is a large, principled collection of naturally occurring texts stored electronically” (p. 2).

Timeline for the development of corpus linguistics

Let’s see how corpus linguistics was discovered and became a distinctive field of study. Scroll the timeline to read the corresponding descriptions.

Now, you have known a little more about how corpus linguistics became prominent in language education. Let’s find out what contemporary research on corpus linguistics can inform us in the next section.