Building and Cleaning Corpora for Linguistic Analysis: A Practical Guide

Abstract

This guide aims to make corpus building and corpus analysis feasible and practical for language instructors and/or researchers who may view building a corpus as difficult or believe that linguistic analysis requires advanced programming skills. Many avoid creating custom corpora due to these perceived barriers, instead relying on existing corpora and basic analysis tools. We present accessible instructions for corpus building, text cleaning, and linguistic analysis based on our coursework and research experience. The guide contains two parts: theoretical foundations covering corpus linguistics definition, research questions in corpus linguistics, and different types of corpora; and practical applications including corpus construction, text preparation, automated annotation, and an introduction to some types of lexical analysis. The guide demonstrates that systematic instruction makes corpus methods accessible to language teachers and novice researchers. We emphasize that hands-on practice is essential for developing corpus research skills and encourage active application of these methods to readers’ research questions. We conclude with a discussion on the benefits of corpus analysis for the language classroom.