Corpus
Definition
A principled, structured collection of texts or transcripts used as the basis for systematic frequency analysis. In forensic work a comparison corpus provides the baseline against which features in a disputed text are measured.
- Nature
- Structured collection of texts or transcripts
- Forensic use
- Baseline for frequency analysis
- Compared against
- Features in a disputed text
Common questions
Why can't a forensic linguist just rely on general intuition about word frequency?+
Intuition about how common a word or phrase is tends to be unreliable and inconsistent between speakers, so a structured corpus provides a measurable, reproducible baseline that can be checked and challenged rather than asserted from memory.
Does the corpus need to match the disputed text's genre exactly?+
A closer genre and register match strengthens the comparison, since word and phrase frequencies vary substantially between, say, casual texting and formal correspondence, so a mismatched corpus can produce misleading frequency claims.
Related terms
- Dialect
- A variety of language defined by a geographic region or social group, characterised by systematic differences in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar from...
- Discourse Structure
- The way a text or conversation is organised above the sentence level: the sequence of moves in an argument, the turn-taking structure...
- Function Words
- Grammatical words, prepositions, conjunctions, articles, pronouns, with little independent content meaning but high frequency in any text. Because they are used without...
- Idiolect
- The language variety specific to an individual, comprising their characteristic vocabulary, syntactic preferences, spelling habits, punctuation patterns, and discourse-level style. Authorship attribution...
- Register
- The variety of language associated with a particular situation, task, or relationship. Register varies along dimensions of formality, technicality, and interactional mode....