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This book showcases sixteen papers from the landmark 30th conference of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME) held at Lancaster University in May 2009. The theme of the book ‘looking back, moving forward'follows that of the conference where participants reflected on the extraordinary growth of corpus linguistics over three decades as well as looking ahead to yet further developments in the future. A separate volume, appearing as an e-publication in the VARIENG series from the University of Helsinki focuses on the methodological and historical dimensions of corpus linguistics. This volume features papers on present-day English and the recent history of English via the increasing availability of corpora covering the last hundred years or so of the language. Contributors to the volume study numerous topics and datasets including recent diachronic change, regional and new Englishes, learner corpora, Academic written English, parallel and translation corpora, corpora of popular music pop lyrics and computer-mediated communication. Overall the volume represents the state of the art in English corpus linguistics and a peek into the future directions for the field.

The papers published in this volume were originally presented at the Sixth International Conference on Teaching and Language Corpora (4-7 July 2004 Granada, Spain) and reflect the latest developments that have taken place in the field of the teaching applications of text corpora, with a special emphasis on their use in the foreign language classroom. The book is divided into three main sections. The first section sets the scene for what this collection of essays aims to be. It deals with the issue of what corpus linguistics can do not only for the understanding of the nature of language itself but also for so fundamental and miraculous a matter such as language learning and language acquisition. The second section tackles the issues of corpus design and corpus exploitation and provides the reader with a great variety of evidence in favour of corpora exploitation for the building of a successful teaching environment. The final section deals with practical applications of corpora in the foreign language classroom. Although each of the papers here reports particular experiences in very different teaching and learning contexts, as a whole they show that corpora can be used on the spot in a language teaching context by teachers and learners without extensive training in computational tools, and studies of linguistics features can be tailored to specific pedagogic context and learning requirements. The book represents a solid contribution to linguistic studies and language teaching and it is a good example of the diversity of the scientific lines in which corpus linguistics is involved at the present moment.

This volume will be of particular interest to readers interested in expanding the applications of corpus linguistics techniques through new tools and approaches. The text includes selected papers from the Fifth North American Symposium, hosted by the Linguistics Department at Montclair State University in Montclair New Jersey in May 2004. The symposium papers represented several areas of corpus studies including language development, syntactic analysis, pragmatics and discourse, language change, register variation, corpus creation and annotation, and practical applications of corpus work, primarily in language teaching, but also in medical training and machine translation. A common thread through most of the papers was the use of corpora to study domains longer than the word. Not surprisingly, fully half of the papers deal with the computational tools and linguistic strategies needed to search for and analyze these longer spans of language while most of the remaining papers examine particular syntactic and rhetorical properties of one or more corpora.

This book will be of particular interest to anyone interested in the application of corpus linguistic techniques to language study and instruction. This volume includes selected papers from the Fourth North American Symposium, held in Indianapolis and hosted by the Indiana Center for Intercultural Communication at Indiana University Purdue University in Indianapolis (IUPUI) in November, 2002. These papers – from authors representing eight countries including the U.S., Belgium, China, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Spain – provide a wide range of views of and approaches to corpus linguistic. Topics range from theory and analysis to classroom application, and include the study of oral discourse as well as the study of written discourse, including internet-based discourse. Consequently, this volume is divided into two sections. The first section focuses on the use of corpus linguistics in the analysis of spoken and written discourse; the second section focuses on the direct pedagogical application of corpus linguistics, reflecting the applied foundation of this branch of linguistics.

The contributions in this volume provide a kaleidoscope of state-of-the-art research in corpus linguistics on lexis and lexicogrammar. Central issues are the presentation of major corpus resources (both corpora and software tools), the findings (especially about frequency) which are simply not accessible without such resources, their theoretical implications relating to both lexical units and word meanings, and the practical – especially pedagogical – applications of corpus findings. This is complemented by a lexicographer's view on the data structures implicit in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The volume, which has sprung from the 36th ICAME conference, held in at Trier University in May 2015, will be of relevance for theoretical and applied linguists interested in corpora, word usage, and the mental lexicon.

Using the Web as Corpus is one of the recent challenges for corpus linguistics. This volume presents a current state-of-the-arts discussion of the topic. The articles address practical problems such as suitable linguistic search tools for accessing the www, the question of register variation, or they probe into methods for culling data from the web. The book also offers a wide range of case studies, covering morphology, syntax, lexis, as well as synchronic and diachronic variation in English. These case studies make use of the two approaches to the www in corpus linguistics – web-as-corpus and web-for-corpus-building. The case studies demonstrate that web data can provide useful additional evidence for a broad range of research questions.

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.