ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we discuss scientific writing as a specific register of English and investigate how Covid-19 has been addressed in research articles. This chapter introduces readers to the principles and methods of corpus linguistic analysis. We will provide a practical demonstration of the procedures of corpus analysis using the CORD-19 corpus: a collection of just under 51,000 documents, totalling more than 224 million words on Covid-19, accessible through the online text analysis interface Sketch Engine. We explain how corpus analyses of scientific writing can be carried out to investigate patterns among words, phrases and word associations, in comparison with other datasets. This enables us to identify some of the specific linguistic features of scientific writing on Covid-19 and highlight some of the key aspects of academic discourse.
