ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the use of the World Wide Web as a corpus in Spanish Linguistics studies. On the one hand, the popularization of digital communication has brought about a new area of linguistic interest, namely, the analysis of computer-mediated communication and discourse. On the other hand, the large quantities and easily accessible nature of text available via the Internet have revolutionized the methodology of working with these linguistic data, especially with respect to the study of variation. This chapter briefly presents the linguistic and communicative characteristics of the texts that can be found in digital media, discusses the different methodologies that are currently used for the study of computer-mediated communication from different perspectives and critically analyses both the usefulness of and the problems associated with using the Internet as a linguistic corpus.
