Type and Purpose of Text

Abstract

The classification of the corpus is not confined to the genre and nature of texts. It spreads far beyond this. In this chapter, we have tried to show that a corpus can also be classified based on the type of text and the purpose of the corpus design. Based on the type of text, a corpus can be termed a ‘monolingual corpus’, which contains text samples from a single language or a dialect variety; a ‘bilingual corpus’, which carries proportional amounts of texts taken from two languages or dialect varieties (which may or may not be genealogically, typologically or geographically related); or a ‘multilingual corpus’, which stores a good amount of language data with proportional distribution across text types from more than two languages. On the other hand, based on the purpose of design, a corpus can be termed an ‘unannotated corpus’ where text samples are kept in their raw form without the addition of metadata or annotation of any kind; or an ‘annotated corpus’ where texts are annotated or tagged with various intralingual and extralingual data and information. Furthermore, we have also described the ‘maxims of corpus annotation’ proposed by earlier scholars; analyzed the issues involved in the act of corpus annotation; referred to the challenges directly and indirectly linked with corpus annotation; and finally, have referred to the state-of-the-art of corpus annotation in English and other languages across the world.