CorTeDo. The first representative corpus of technical documentation

Abstract

This essay presents the M.A. project CorTeDo (Corpus of Technical Documentation), in which a corpus of technical documentation was compiled. With the aid of the corpus, claims about technical documents, such as their limited lexical and syntactic variation, were revisited. Additional characteristics were unearthed with an array of methods such as keyword analysis, n-gram analysis and collocation analysis. This research is a contribution to the fields of technical documentation, genre- based teaching and linguistics. It promotes the understanding of different genres and uses of language, especially those that have traditionally been overlooked. In the future, CorTeDo will be expanded to form a group of corpora that can be utilised as the basis for further analysis in all of the above fields and beyond.