The use of large, computerized bodies of text for linguistic analysis and description has emerged in recent years as one of the most significant and rapidly-developing fields of activity in the study of language. This book. This book provides a comprehensive introduction and guide to corpus linguistics. All aspects of the field are explored, from the various types of electronic corpora that are available to instructions on how to design and compile a corpus. Graeme Kennedy surveys the development of corpora for use in linguistic research, looking back to the pre-electronic age as well as to the massive growth of computer corpora in the electronic age. The study focuses primarily on corpus-based descriptions of English: lexis, morphology, syntax and variation. It includes a wide-ranging overview of the published research of corpus linguists to illustrate the results and potential of distributional analyses of English. The section on corpus analysis describes the methodology and procedures that are generally employed including lemmatisation, tagging, parsing and the use of important search and retrieval software to produce wordlists, concordances and other analyses. The final section of the book discusses ways in which the corpus-based analysis of languages may contribute to linguistic theory, the description of languages, computational linguistics and language teaching.