ABSTRACT
We are currently in the third age of computerized corpus linguistics. The first, the Age of Pioneers was characterized by the pathfinding work conducted, mainly in the 1960s and 1970s, by such scholars as Francis (Brown corpus) and Carroll (American Heritage) in the United States and by Leech (LOB ) and Svartvik (London-Lund ) in Europe, in compiling and computerizing the first corpora in difficult intellectual and technological circumstances. The second, the Age of Expansion, which began in the 1980s, was marked by ambitious and expensive projects to build what Kennedy (1998: vi) calls the ‘second generation megacorpora’, very large heterogeneric corpora containing tens or in some cases hundreds of millions of words of text. They are mostly based at universities in the United Kingdom and include Cobuild (Bank of English), the British National Corpus, the Longman corpus network and the International Corpus of English (ICE) (Greenbaum 1996). These projects are ongoing and are invaluable to linguists all over the globe.
