ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on four major areas of activity in corpus linguistics. It includes corpus design and development, corpus-based descriptions of aspects of English structure and use, the particular techniques and tools used in corpus analysis, applications of corpus-based linguistic description. Corpus linguistics did not begin with the development of computers but computers have given corpus linguistics a huge boost by reducing much of the drudgery of text-based linguistic description. With modern software, computer-based corpora are easily accessible, greatly reducing the drudgery and sheer bureaucracy of dealing with the increasingly large amounts of data used for compiling dictionaries and other information sources. The definition of a corpus as a collection of texts in an electronic database can beg many questions for there are many different kinds of corpora.
