What questions to ask Biber?

[xuyi]

Reppen and Biber in NAU is coming to my university. I am thinking this is a good chance, but i am not too familiar with the topic; interested in actual techniques for using concordances. Do you guys have suggestions for what questions i could ask? They are building the American National Corpus
http://americannationalcorpus.org/index.html

 

[stream]

You may ask them about how to buy the book they have written on variation on speech and writing in China?
it is really a good chance! which university are you in? Do the outsiders have the possibility to participate in the activity in your school?

 

[xujiajin]

1. Variation has been the key key word in Biber's research. Whatesle is he going to explore in corpus-based research?

2. Can corpus-based research go beyond lexis and incorporate more discourse-functional research? Currently discourse-pragmatic corpus research is still largely limted to lexical(ized) structures.

 

[iCasino]

回复：What questions to ask Biber?

Since guys with a strong background in computer science, e.g. Rayson (2002), have began to semantically compare linguistic features across corpora, how long will it take to make it a mainstream?

References:
Rayson, Paul. Matrix: A statistical method and software tool for linguistic analysis through corpus comparison. Ph. D. Dissertation. Lancaster University, 2002.

 

[xuyi]

Thank you very much for the questions! If you guys are interested, i will summarize the answers and post them here this weekend. The sources you refer to are very helpful to me as well.
To Stream, i am at University of Arizona. I am not sure whether they would know the publication information in China, but if there is a need, i can bring a book or two back to China, or mail it to you. (But i looked at Amazon and it costs 30 dollars here.)