This book presents a richly illustrated, hands-on discussion of one of the fastest growing fields in linguistics today. The authors address key methodological issues in corpus linguistics, such as collocations, keywords and the categorization of concordance lines. They show how these topics can be explored step-by-step with BNCweb, a user-friendly web-based tool that supports sophisticated analyses of the 100-million-word British National Corpus. Indeed, the BNC and BNCweb have been described by Geoffrey Leech as -an unparalleled combination of facilities for finding out about...

Based on an innovative corpus-based approach, this book offers a comprehensive survey of the phonological and phonetic properties of L2 speech in English and German. The first part of the book critically examines current theoretical models and research methodologies in the field of second language acquisition of phonology and describes the advances that have been made in corpus linguistics over the past few years in particular, the development of phonological learner corpora. It furthermore presents the first learner corpus of L2 English and L2 German that is fully aligned and has extensive...

The author analyses computer chat as a form of communication. While some forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC) deviate only marginally from traditional writing, computer chat is popularly considered to be written conversation and the most -oral- form of written CMC. This book systematically explores the varying degrees of conversationality (-orality-) in CMC, focusing in particular on a corpus of computer chat (synchronous and supersynchronous CMC) compiled by the author. The author employs Douglas Biber s multidimensional methodology and situates the chats relative to a range of...