ABSTRACT
Sociolinguistics is the study of variation in language form and use that is associated with social, situational, attitudinal, temporal, and geographic influences. Corpus linguistics is a research approach that facilitates practical investigations of language variation and use, producing a range of reliable and generalizable linguistic data that can be extensively interpreted. The corpus approach follows methodological innovations that allow scholars to ask 'new' research questions on existing linguistic phenomena across many social situations. The exploration of sociolinguistics using corpora and corpus tools is still a relatively new area of research compared to established ethnographic methods, emerging from variationist studies in the mid-1980s. Friginal and Hardy argue that, although corpus-based sociolinguistics has not yet been fully and completely integrated into the larger field of sociolinguistics, there is no denying its important contribution and increasing influence. This chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
