Corpus Analysis

Abstract

Large and small language text corpora have become quite ubiquitous in the broad fields that make up the study of language and social interaction. This article provides an introduction to the concept of the “corpus” where language research is at issue and to the field of corpus linguistics. It reviews the main corpus analysis tools and the sort of perspectives they can open for language data. Finally, it gives a very broad overview of the ways in which corpus analysis has to date informed, or is beginning to permeate, different areas of language study.