Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book begins the concepts and central tenets of corpus linguistics and triangulation. It describes the corpus-driven versus corpus-based distinction is used as a starting point for explaining how the analyses were grouped and ordered. Around 20 bc, Emperor Caesar Augustus erected the Golden Milestone, a monument in the central forum of Ancient Rome. Such was the power of the Empire that all roads were considered to begin from it and distances were measured from that point, resulting in the still-used phrase 'All roads lead to Rome'. Most contemporary corpus linguists employ triangulation to an extent in their own research by, for example, using different techniques on their corpora. However, the potential benefits of triangulating the results of two or more corpus-linguistic methods have been largely unexplored.