Seven or eight of the following fifteen questions will appear on the final exam, and you will answer each of these questions (probably about two paragraphs each)

1. In one or two sentences each, discuss which corpus (or other electronic source) of English you would use for each of the following tasks, and why:
   1. historical changes from the 1300s-1600s
   2. changes from the 1960s-1990s
   3. collocations for a given word
   4. differences between 5-10 different types of written English
   5. data from learners of English
   6. the evolution of the meaning of a given word over the past 400 years
2. Provide a brief overview of the history of corpus linguistics from the 1950s-1900s
3. Imagine that someone has asked you to create a 10 million word corpus of a language of your choice, or a particular aspect of English.  What are 5-6 design criteria that might be important, and how would you address each of these?
4. What are 5-6 of the most important principles governing the use of concordances?
5. When would each of the following be most helpful:
   1. WordCruncher (the version we’ve been using)
   2. WordSmith
   3. relational databases
6. What are the uses of each of the following:
   1. proportions
   2. chi-square
   3. z-scores
   4. factor analysis
7. Briefly discuss Biber’s “multi-dimensional” approach to register variation
8. What are 5-6 of the major challenges and issues facing the designers or historical corpora and/or challenges in using these corpora to investigate language change
9. What are the major uses of parallel corpora?
10. How can corpora most effectively be used in the classroom?
11. What are some general principles governing the use of data from the Web?

12. Comment on the idea that “corpora have made language analysis more simple, as well as more complex”
13. Give some examples where corpora provide (even native speakers) with insights that otherwise might not be available
14. How does the approach to data taken in most corpus-based studies compare to that of many more formalist-based studies?
15. Briefly discuss the idea that language is best analyzed (and learned) at the lexical / word level, rather than as abstract grammatical rules