Linguistic classification criteria

 

The following criteria for classification can be applied to corpora, subcorpora and components. Linguistic criteria may be:

External

in that they concern the participants, the occasion, the social setting, the communicative function of the pieces of language, etc. These are the familiar categories of =1 (; KuceraFrancis1967), =1 (; HoflandJohansson1982), =1 (; Sinclair1988), =1 (; AtkinsClearOstler1992) and =1 (; NERC1994).

Internal

in that they concern the recurrence of language patterns within the pieces of language. These are newer and of growing interest -- see =1 (; Biber1988) and =1 (; Nakamura1993).

External criteria are largely mapped onto corpora from text typology, which is not dealt with fully here, being the subject of subsequent work. Internal criteria are the subject of later work also.