Customer Reviews

Corpus Linguistics (Edinburgh Textbooks in Empirical Linguistics)

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Even as a non-computational linguist, I found this book very readable. It covers a nice range of the relevant topics, and is very careful about defining terminology---a practice that other writers in computational linguistics would do well to follow. The book is unusually well-organized. Though there's not much depth of coverage of many topics, the references for further reading are very well selected, and do a lot to make up for this. The final chapter gives a very nice example of the application of empirical data to a theoretical question, and is worth the price of the book itself.

I am a professor of linguistics, and was assigned to teach a general Corpus Linguistics course for the first time. This book was billed as a standard first textbook in the subject, suitable for uninitiated linguistics students. We have found that the book is chiefly an annotated bibliography of the field, and does not cover enough topics in sufficient depth to serve as a course textbook. I have had to supplement nearly every portion of the course with either additional readings or methodology that I provide on my own. The students find it dreadfully dry, it reads almost like a phone book, jumping lightly from one barely-treated topic to another without ever actually teaching a single thing.

Unfortunately, the publisher refused my efforts to contact them to get myself an advance copy. Now I know why this happened---by letting me see the book in advance, they would likely have lost a bunch of sales.