Corpora are widely used in linguistics, but not always wisely. This book
attempts to frame corpus linguistics systematically as a variant of the
observational method. The first part introduces the reader to the
general methodological discussions surrounding corpus data as well as
the practice of doing corpus linguistics, including issues such as the
scientific research cycle, research design, extraction of corpus data
and statistical evaluation. The second part consists of a number of case
studies from the main areas of corpus linguistics (lexical associations,
morphology, grammar, text and metaphor), surveying the range of issues
studied in corpus linguistics while at the same time showing how they
fit into the methodology outlined in the first part.