SECTION B

SECTION B EXTENSION

Section A introduced some important concepts in corpus linguistics. We also briefly considered the use of corpora in a range of areas of language studies. In this section, readers will get an opportunity to read excerpts from published material which will go into a number of research areas in more depth. The excerpts presented in this section have been selected carefully using a number of criteria. The primary criterion is the originality, importance and influence of the paper in the area of study. The second criterion is its current relevance. Given the second criterion, it is unsurprising that, with a few exceptions, the majority of the papers in this section were published in or after 1998. The final criterion is a pragmatic one ?some papers, while interesting, simply did not fit well with the overall design of the book. We are fully aware that a book of this size cannot possibly include all of the publications which meet the above criteria. Also, the recentness of data included here can be viewed as an advantage or a disadvantage, depending upon one’s viewpoint. Those who view it as a disadvantage might argue that the book is wanting in historical background. Nevertheless, it can also be argued reasonably that the focus on current research is as important as historical depth. Readers interested in the historical dimension of corpus linguistics should look to Biber, Conrad and Reppen (1998), Kennedy (1998), and McEnery and Wilson (2001), which have already covered much of the history of corpus analysis. Furthermore, readers can refer to McCarthy and Sampson (2004) for an anthology of important publications on corpus linguistics including papers from its early years.

The excerpts selected using the above criteria are designed to help readers understand a number of key concepts in corpus linguistics and bring them up to date with the latest developments in corpus-based language studies. They are also selected to get readers familiarized with a particular area of study so that they will be ready to explore the case studies in Section C. Note that in order to save space in this book, the excerpts are presented without notes or references. Readers are advised to refer to the original publications for these. We would also like to remind readers that the terminology used in each excerpt may differ slightly from that adopted in this book. At no point, however, does this slight imprecision interfere with the general argument presented.

This section consists of two parts. Part 1 'Important and controversial issues' (units 11-12) discusses further some important or controversial issues in corpus linguistics introduced in Section A, namely corpus representativeness and balance (unit 11), and the pros and cons of the corpus-based approach (unit 12). Part 2 'Corpus linguistics in action' (units 13-16) presents corpus-based studies in some of the areas we considered in Section A including, for example, lexical and grammatical studies (unit 13), language variation (unit 14), contrastive and diachronic studies (unit 15), and finally language teaching and learning (unit 16).