【正确答案】正确答案：The importance of corpus data to language study is aligned to the importance of empirical data. Starting from this view, we will find that corpora can play important roles in a number of different fields of study related to language, such as, speech research, lexical studies, semantics, social psychology, etc. In view of the huge amount of corpus-based linguistic research, the examples here are selective. ① Speech research. A spoken corpus provides a broad sample of speech, extending over a wide selection of variables such as speaker gender, speaker age, speech class, genre, etc. This allows generalizations to be made about spoken language as the corpus is as wide and as representative as possible. It also provides for variation with a given spoken language to be studied. It also provides a sample of naturalistic speech rather than speech elicited under artificial conditions.(3 points) ② Lexical studies. A linguist who has access to a corpus can call up all the examples of a word or phrase from many millions of words of texts in a few seconds. Dictionaries can be produced and revised much more quickly than before, thus providing up-to-date information about language. Also, definitions can be more complete and precise since a large number of natural examples are examined.(3 points) ③ Semantics. Corpus linguistics contributes to semantics by helping to establish an approach which is objective, because semantic distinctions are associated in texts with characteristic observable contexts syntactically, morphologically and prosodically. By considering the environment of the linguistic entities an empirical objective indicator for a particular semantic distinction can be arrived. Another role of corpora in semantics has been in establishing more firmly the notions of fuzzy categories and gradience. In looking empirically at natural language in corpora, clear-cut boundaries do not exist; instead there are gradients of membership which are connected with frequency of inclusion.(3 points) ④ Sociolinguistics. Although sociolinguistics is an empirical field of research, it is not often rigorously sampled. Sometimes the data are also elicited rather than naturalistic data. A corpus can provide a representative sample of naturalistic data which can be quantified.(3 points) ⑤ Psycholinguistics. In the field of psycholinguistics, sampled corpora can provide psycholinguistics with more concrete and reliable information about frequency, including the frequencies of different senses and parts of speech of ambiguous words. Next, corpus data can be used to examine the occurrence of speech errors in natural conversation. A third role for corpora lied in the analysis of language pathologies, where an accurate picture of abnormal data must be constructed before it is possibly to hypothesize and test what may be wrong with the human language processing system.(3 points)

【答案解析】解析：考查语料库数据的作用。语料库对语言学习的重要性与经验数据对语言学习的重要性是并驾齐驱的。语料库对有关语言学习的不同领域起着重要的作用，例如语言研究、词汇研究、语法、语义、语用学、语篇分析、社会语言学、文体学、历史语言学、方言学、变异学习、心理语言学、社会心理学和文化学习等。