Multilingual corpus and its software for European studies research

Abstract

The paper proposes the method of working with the functionality of the computer programs AntConc, WordSmith, WordList, MonoConc Pro, CATMA, and KORP, which can be used to study the multilingual corpus texts on the topic of European Studies. Various debatable views of foreign scientists ‒ representatives of corpus linguistics ‒ regarding the content of the concept of the multilingual corpus have been considered. Besides, there has been formulated a working definition of the multilingual comparative corpus that belongs to the combined type of thematically oriented corpora of texts in different languages, grouped into sub-corpora, with their translation into other languages (or with the possibility to use computer programs to translate texts). The paper also defines the role of corpus linguistic statistics, which deals with the analyzed computer programs and allows to calculate the frequency of words or collocations use, construct diagrams of the frequency of word or collocation use in sub-corpora of texts, etc. Thus there has been made a preliminary conclusion that the computer toolkit of the corpus managers AntConc, WordSmith, WordList, MonoConc Pro, CATMA and KORP makes it possible to construct both individual Key Word in Context (KWIC) and concordance lists of search elements on the subject of European Studies; distinguish between the functionality of one or another contextual meaning of search units in their most probable left-handed and right-handed valency in different languages; see the results of statistical processing of the information from corpus tags; save and print the results; support different formats of text data (txt, doc, rtf, html, etc.).