Corpus Linguistics and the Description of English

Reviews / Votes

While it assumes a certain amount of background knowledge in grammar and linguistics, the textbook is accessible and sets a good pace for most readers who have an interest in learning how to use electronic corpora and in establishing what can be discovered through corpus research and analysis. Lindquist's book is organised clearly and uses interesting stepby-step examples to illustrate the benefits and limitations of corpus linguistics. Numerous tables and charts throughout the book make the author's examples meaningful and applicable. Each chapter includes study questions, online corpus exercises and suggestions for further reading. As a result of its hands-on approach and accessible prose, this book will be useful and enjoyable for students who are curious about language and intrigued by the capacity of corpora as a tool to investigate it. It offers informative and exciting step-by-step analyses that demonstrate how to use electronic corpora and what linguists can do with the results. The many graphs and charts not only explain the results of the searches conducted for this book, but also demonstrate to readers how to report the results of the studies they may conduct in future. Students will be excited to follow Lindquist as he describes how to investigate language using electronic corpora, and will be sufficiently well versed in the discussion of corpus data to analyse meaningfully and successfully their own data.y -- Stacey Wizner, Qatar University * Corpora * Corpus Linguistics and the Description of English is a practical textbook that provides a vivid introduction to the field of corpus linguistics and the description of English... For anyone looking to do some hands-on investigations on language using existing corpora, this book can only be highly recommended. This textbook is a valuable addition to existing literature on corpus-linguistic methods of research and contributes greatly to making corpus linguistics more approachable to students. -- Stephanie Ullmann * Corpus Pragmatics * Two generations of corpus linguists teamed up for this edition, and the authors' profound expertise in research and teaching is clearly in evidence throughout, both in the concise discussion of key issues and the thoughtful methodology of exercises. Through its systematic structure, the book can easily and profitably be used as a week-by-week semester textbook or, alternatively, provides self-contained study units in specialist seminars that seek to integrate a corpus perspective." -- Stefan Diemer, Trier University of Applied Sciences * ICAME, Volume 44, 2020 * Two generations of corpus linguists teamed up for this edition, and the authors' profound expertise in research and teaching is clearly in evidence throughout, both in the concise discussion of key issues and the thoughtful methodology of exercises. Through its systematic structure, the book can easily and profitably be used as a week-by-week semester textbook or, alternatively, provides self-contained study units in specialist seminars that seek to integrate a corpus perspective. -- Stefan Diemer, Trier University of Applied Sciences * ICAME, Volume 44, 2020 * The updated edition of Corpus Linguistics and the Description of English makes an outstanding introductory book on corpus linguistics. It covers the most important basics of corpus linguistics methodology in a highly accessible way, and illustrates the applications of corpus linguistic analysis in some of the most prominent areas of English language description in a nontechnical manner. The study questions, hands-on exercises, and further reading provided at the end of each chapter dramatically improve its suitability as a textbook for a first course on corpus linguistics for undergraduate and master's students in English language and literature. Readers of the first edition will also find the new edition decidedly superior, with its new coverage of social media, DIY corpora, and ethical concerns, new materials on metonymy and pragmatics, comprehensive information on new corpora, and numerous updated example investigations, exercises, and study questions. -- Xiaofei Lu * Journal of English Linguistics * The updated edition of Corpus Linguistics and the Description of English makes an outstanding introductory book on corpus linguistics. -- Xiaofei Lu, Pennsylvania State University * Journal of English Linguistics * Corpus Linguistics and the Description of English is a most welcome addition to the existing range of textbooks in the field. It is a sensible practical introduction to an increasingly complex corpus-linguistic working environment and strikes the right balance between discussion of technical issues and the description of English. -- Professor Christian Mair, Universitaet Freiburg