Corpus Linguistics and the Description of English

A comprehensive introduction to corpus linguistics, featuring new case studies and practical exercises. The third edition of this successful text provides an ideal introduction for university students of English at the intermediate level. Students planning papers, dissertations or theses will find the book a particularly valuable guide. After introducing corpora and the rationale and basic methodology of corpus linguistics, the authors present a number of recent case studies providing new insights into vocabulary, collocations, phraseology, metaphor and metonymy, syntactic structures, gender and language, and language change. In a final chapter it is shown how the web and social media can be used as a source for linguistic investigations as well as including a section on creating your own corpus. Each chapter includes new study questions, exercises and updated suggestions for further reading. Readers also benefit from an accompanying web-page with exercises and updated information about freely accessible corpora.