ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines key concepts, principles and methodological advantages of corpus linguistics. Corpus linguistics can be seen as part of the digital humanities. Or, if this is too controversial a statement for some, certainly analytical techniques in corpus linguistics can be used by digital humanists. The term 'digital humanities' refers to humanities research, teaching, and creation which takes place at the junction of computing and the disciplines of the humanities, as well as social sciences. Something else that corpus evidence illuminates is the relative rarity of non-deliberate ambiguity in language use, as opposed to deliberate ambiguity for purposes of play. A specialised corpus will normally include text of a particular genre such as a corpus of school biology essays written by 16-year-olds. A standard automated form of data annotation in corpus linguistics is 'tagging'. It highlights the improbability of some key elements of Derrida's philosophy of language.
