ABSTRACT
According to Hunston, even though corpus linguistics is a relatively new field, it has revolutionized language studies because it has provided new ways of analyzing and describing the use of language. This chapter emphasizes the fact that corpora consist of texts stored in an electronic format, which enables researchers to use special software to conduct automatic searches and gain insights into the structure and regularity of naturally occurring language. It introduces corpus linguistics as a methodology which relies on corpora, that is, large, principled and computer-readable collections of language data. The chapter discusses the usefulness of corpus-based analysis as well as its limitations and provides an overview of different types of corpora, focusing in particular on databases that can be accessed free of charge via web-based interfaces. General corpora consist of a wide range of texts that represent natural language as it is used across a variety of contexts.
