ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to introduce a number of basic guidelines that you can use to help you design special purpose corpora that will meet your own LSP needs. We consider the criteria required to design a useful special purpose corpus, paying particular attention to issues such as size, number of texts, medium, subject, text type, authorship, language and publication date. The main focus of this chapter will be monolingual corpora, though many of the issues raised here are applicable to multilingual corpora as well. In addition, Chapters 8, 10 and 11 will give you suggestions for designing LSP corpora to carry out specific tasks such as glossary building, writing and translation.
