Book Description

Explorations in Corpus Linguistics contains selected papers from the eighteenth International Conference on English Language Research on Computerised Corpora (ICAME 18). The papers give a broad overview of the latest activities in corpus linguistics. Issues associated with the creation of corpora are raised, topics ranging from corpus design, to problems of rare data acquisition and data protection, to the relative merits of corpora and free text collections. The main body of the volume is devoted to reports on the analysis of corpora. Several papers offer synchronic descriptions of aspects of modern language usage, in both spoken and written corpora. Some corpora are 'general' in content; those deriving from specialised textual domains include parallel corpora of international varieties of English and of learner language. The diachronic dimension of corpus-based study is also represented, in the examination of some modern-day grammatical features from a historical perspective, and by socio-pragmatic and sociolinguistic studies of diachronic corpus data. The principal aim of English corpus linguistics as reflected here is to describe language in use; there are also cases where such description forms a basis for the development of resources and tools, including specialised taggers, an Internet-based grammar, a glossary, and software to identify semantic relations and diachronic change within corpora.