ABSTRACT
What is a corpus? What kind of data do we find in World Englishes corpora? Which components are typical of a corpus? How can we conduct corpus-linguistic analyses? These and several related questions are covered by this chapter, which offers a gentle introduction to the nuts and bolts of working with corpora, extracting data, and evaluating the results. After an introduction to corpus linguistics and corpus-linguistic approaches to language, basic design features of corpora are introduced. Then, the chapter takes a closer look at concordances, handling frequencies, collocations, and so-called ‘regular expressions’ that we can use to search text collections in a more complex way. Finally, the chapter briefly introduces the basics of doing statistical analysis and offers recommendations on further literature as well as exercises to put the newly acquired knowledge to the test.
