"The use of large, computerized bodies of text for linguistic analysis and description has emerged in recent years as one of the most significant and rapidly-developing fields of activity in the study of language. This book provides a comprehensive introduction and guide to Corpus Linguistics. All aspects of the field are explored, from the various types of electronic corpora that are available to instructions on how to design and compile a corpus. Graeme Kennedy surveys the development of corpora for use in linguistic research, looking back to the pre-electronic age as well as to the massive growth of computer corpora in the electronic age."--BOOK JACKET. Read more... Acknowledgements 1. INTRODUCTION Corpora The role of computers in corpus linguistics The scope of corpus linguistics 2. THE DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF CORPORA Pre-electronic corpora Types of electronic corpora Major electronic corpora for linguistic research Electonic text databases Issues in corpus design and compilation Compling a corpus Organizations and professional associations concerned with corpus design, development and research 3. CORPUS-BASED DESCRIPTIONS OF ENGLISH Lexical description Grammatical studies centred on morphemes or words Grammatical studies centred on the sentence Pragmatics and spoken discourse Corpus-based studies of variation in the use of English 4. CORPUS ANALYSIS Corpus annotation and processing Procedures used in corpus analysis Corpus search and retrieval software 5. IMPLICATIONS AND APPLICATIONS OF CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS Goals of linguistic description and the effect of corpora on methodology Corpus linguistics and computational linguistics Corpus-based approaches to language teaching References Index