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 (

; Kucera Francis 1967) , =1 (

; Hofland Johansson 1982) ,

=1 (

; Sinclair 1988) , =1 (

; Atkins Clear Ostler 1992) and =1 (

; NERC 1994) .

Internal

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

; Biber 1988) and =1 (

; Nakamura 1993) .

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.