ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the concept of a corpus and locates corpus linguistics as an approach to language study that concerns with the analysis of authentic language, and a focus on language variation, using large amounts of texts. It also provides twelve different projects that use existing online corpora in order to introduce the basics of how to work with corpora, interpret data, and present findings. The study of language variation seeks to gain an understanding of how language changes and varies for different reasons and in different contexts. An important part of linguistic study focuses on analyzing language and explaining what may seem on the surface to be a confusing circumstance of facts that may not make much sense. One way to understand linguistic analysis and language is through corpus linguistics, which looks at how language is actually used in certain contexts and how it can vary from context to context.
