Covering the major approaches to the use of corpus data, this work gathers together influential readings from leading names in the discipline, including Biber, Widdowson, Sinclair, Carter and McCarthy.

UBLI has conducted field surveys since 2002 and built spoken language corpora for French, Spanish, Italian (Salentino dialect), Russian, Malaysian, Turkish, Japanese, and Canadian multilinguals. This volume features new research presented at the UBLI second workshop on Corpus Linguistics – Research Domain, which was held on September 14, 2006. The first part consisting of eleven presentations to this workshop shows a wide range of subjects within the area of corpus-based research, such as dictionary, linguistic atlas, dialect, translation, ancient texts, non-standard texts, sociolinguistics, second language acquisition, and natural language processing. The second part of this volume comprises ten additional contributions to both written and spoken corpora by the members and research assistants of UBLI.

This volume comprises nine contributions that were written by up-and-coming corpus-based researchers with varied areas of expertise, who were all disciples of Douglas Biber sometime in the past two decades. These papers cover a wide variety of linguistic analyses and describe the principles of the Flagstaff school: a careful procedure for language corpora collection with special consideration for corpus size, representativeness, sampling and systematic analysis; the use of computer programming abilities that allow the posing of corpus-based research questions never asked before; and a strong emphasis on the combination of quantitative methods based on sound and innovative statistical procedures complemented with comprehensive qualitative functional analyses of the language. This volume has been edited in honor of Douglas Biber, a pioneer of the American school of corpus-based research.

This volume consists of selected papers from the 2009 meeting of the American Association for Corpus Linguistics. The chapters cover aspects of language use (usage-based accounts of morphology/syntax of English and Tok Pisin), language learning (corpus-based learning of English, syntactic development observable in a Learner Corpus of English, “core” vocabulary items for learners of English) and language documentation (a new and innovative usage-based frequency dictionary of English, proposals to broaden the traditional understanding of a corpus in various directions, e.g., constructing a corpus of the content of Japanese manga comics). Taken together, the thirteen chapters represent a good cross-section of strands of new work in corpus linguistics, as practised by international scholars working on English and other languages.

Corpora are used widely in linguistics, but not always wisely. This book attempts to frame corpus linguistics systematically as a variant of the observational method. The first part introduces the reader to the general methodological discussions surrounding corpus data as well as the practice of doing corpus linguistics, including issues such as the scientific research cycle, research design, extraction of corpus data and statistical evaluation. The second part consists of a number of case studies from the main areas of corpus linguistics (lexical associations, morphology, grammar, text and metaphor), surveying the range of issues studied in corpus linguistics while at the same time showing how they fit into the methodology outlined in the first part.

This book is concerned with cross-linguistic contrast of major grammatical categories in English and Chinese, two most important yet genetically different world languages. This genetic difference has resulted in many subsidiary differences that are, among other things, related to grammar. Compared with typologically related languages, cross-linguistic contrast of English and Chinese is more challenging yet promising. The main theme of this book lies in its focus on cross-linguistic contrast of aspect-related grammatical categories, or, grammatical categories that contribute to aspectual meaning – both situation aspect at the semantic level and viewpoint aspect at the grammatical level – in English and Chinese. The unique strength of this volume lies in that it is first corpus-based book contrasting English and Chinese. Given that the state of the art in language studies is to use corpora, the significance of the marriage between contrastive studies and the corpus methodology in this book is not to be underestimated.

Studies in Corpus-Based Sociolinguistics illustrates how sociolinguistic approaches and linguistic distributions from corpora can be effectively combined to produce meaningful studies of language use and language variation. Three major parts comprise the volume focusing on: (1) Corpora and the Study of Languages and Dialects, in particular, varieties of global Englishes; (2) Corpora and Social Demographics; and (3) Corpora and Register Characteristics. The 14 peer-reviewed, new, and original chapters explore language variation related to regional dialectology, gender, sexuality, age, race, ‘nation,’ workplace discourse, diachronic change, and social media and web registers. Invited contributors made use of systematically-designed general and specialized corpora, sound research questions, methodologies (e.g., keyword analysis, multi-dimensional analysis, clusters, and collocations), and logical/credible interpretive techniques. Studies in Corpus-Based Sociolinguistics is an important resource for researchers and graduate students in the fields of sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, and applied linguistics.