ABSTRACT
Languages for specific purposes (LSP) refers to the area of applied linguistics devoted to the study, description and teaching of different types of language used by specific discourse communities. Two main areas that are of interest to English for specific purposes (ESP) researchers are English for academic purposes (EAP) and English for occupational purposes (EOP) (e.g. varieties of English used in medical, legal or business contexts). This chapter discusses the importance of specialized corpora in the study of vocabulary. It describes the characteristic features of such corpora and explains how they can be employed to study specific uses of vocabulary and the lexical variation they entail. The chapter presents some examples of their applications in a range of areas including ESP, EAP, translation studies, literary linguistics, stylistics and sociolinguistics, to demonstrate the usefulness of specialized corpora.
