THE ROLE OF CORPUS ANNOTATION IN LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS

Abstract

Corpus annotation has become a fundamental instrument in contemporary linguistic research, enabling structured, replicable, and quantitative approaches to language analysis. By enriching raw textual or spoken data with morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic labels, annotated corpora facilitate deeper inquiry into language patterns and communicative functions. This article follows the IMRaD structure to examine the role of corpus annotation within linguistic analysis. The introduction outlines the theoretical foundations of corpus linguistics and the necessity of annotation. The methodology section details the main annotation types, tools, and workflows. Results focus on key findings from linguistic research made possible through annotated corpora, including lexical, grammatical, semantic, and discourse-level insights. The discussion analyzes the implications of annotation for language teaching, lexicography, NLP technologies, and cross-linguistic research, as well as challenges such as ambiguity and inter-annotator reliability. The article concludes by emphasizing that corpus annotation is indispensable for both theoretical and applied linguistics and will continue to shape future language research.