Corpus linguistics

Corpus linguistics is the scientific study of a principled collection of machine-readable texts, which can be spoken, written, or multimodal. It incorporates a range of methods and practices for compiling and interrogating language corpora so as to reveal patterns underlying real language-in-use. As an applied linguistic discipline, corpus linguistics has attracted the interest of lexicographers, grammarians, language teachers, sociolinguists, psycholinguists, discourse analysts, researchers of language acquisition, new media, medical communication, computer-assisted language learning, and so on. In the digital age, where terabytes of language data can easily be produced daily by individuals, (social) media, and organizations, corpus linguistics is casting new light on digital communication and modern life and informing the development of new and smart technologies. This chapter provides a brief overview of the development, methods, practices, and applications of corpus linguistics. It also highlights current topics and directions for further research.