View article

Since the 1960s, electronic corpora have come to prominence as a resource used by linguists. While their use remains a source of debate and controversy to this day (see for example Newmeyer 2003; Prodromou 1997; Seidlehofer 2003: 77–123; Widdowson 1991) their contribution to linguistics in general, and English linguistics in particular, as well as to language teaching, is now widely acknowledged. Corpus tools have not only strengthened the position of descriptive linguistics, but have also enhanced theoretically oriented linguistic research. This contribution has been felt most strongly in English linguistics, as it was pioneering work undertaken on English language corpora, such as the Brown corpus (Francis and Kuãera 1964), which set the agenda for much of the work that has been undertaken using corpora since then. In this chapter we will examine the nature of corpus linguistics, review the general …