ABSTRACT
The first eight exploration sections involve the study of concordance lines. You may already be familiar with them; there are a number of websites where you can obtain your own concordance lines. Basically they are taken from an electronic 'corpus' (or collection of texts) which can be searched for examples of any word of interest (among other things). The lines used here come from the British National Corpus, 'a 100 million word snapshot of British English', made up of 4000 spoken and written texts from the 1990s. More information can be found at www.natcorp@oucs.ox.ac.uk
