The Changing Face of Corpus Linguistics

Book excerpt: This volume is witness to a spirited and fruitful period in the evolution of corpus linguistics. In twenty-two articles written by established corpus linguists, members of the ICAME (International Computer Archive of Modern and Mediaeval English) association, this new volume brings the reader up to date with the cycle of activities which make up this field of study as it is today, dealing with corpus creation, language varieties, diachronic corpus study from the past to present, present-day synchronic corpus study, the web as corpus, and corpus linguistics and grammatical theory. It thus serves as a valuable guide to the state of the art for linguistic researchers, teachers and language learners of all persuasions. After over twenty years of evolution, corpus linguistics has matured, incorporating nowadays not just small, medium and large primary corpus building but also specialised and multi-dimensional secondary corpus building; not just corpus analysis, but also corpus evaluation; not just an initial application of theory, but self-reflection and a new concern with theory in the light of experience. The volume also highlights the growing emphasis on language as a changing phenomenon, both in terms of established historical study and the newer short-range diachronic study of 20th century and current English; and the growing area of overlap between these two. Another section of the volume illustrates the recent changes in the definition of 'corpus' which have come about due to the emergence of new technologies and in particular of the availability of texts on the world wide web. The volume culminates in the contributions by a group of corpus grammarians to a timely and novel discussion panel on the relationship between corpus linguistics and grammatical theory.