An Introduction to Corpus Linguistics

Divided into two main sections, this book introduces corpus linguistics to a student readership who have grown up in the era of ubiquitous computing, internet search and social media. The first section presents the theoretical and methodological basics. The second section takes students through a series of case studies, with exercises, showing how corpora can offer insights into linguistic theory, namely lexis, grammar, and lexico-grammar. It shows how corpora can provide them with descriptions of language in use, in different contexts, such as academic discourse and text messages; and how corpora can be used to study and assess language acquisition and learning. It then brings the recalibrated perspective to bear on current large-scale corpus applications such as data mining, sentiment analysis, and web-as-corpus. A companion website provides links to free online corpora and software, and also contains academic English language and study skills exercises aimed at non-native English speaking readers developed using the book itself as a corpus.