This book provides an up-to-date survey of current issues and approaches in corpus linguistics in the form of twenty-two recent research articles. The articles cover a wide range of topics illustrating the diversity of research that is characteristic of corpus linguistics today. Central themes are the relationship between theory, intuition and corpus data and the role of corpora in linguistic research. The majority of the articles are empirical studies of specific aspects of English, ranging from lexis and grammar to discourse and pragmatics. Other areas explored are language variation, language change and development, language learning, cross-linguistic comparisons of English and other languages, and the development of linguistic software tools. The contributors to the volume include some of the leading figures in the field such as M.A.K. Halliday, John Sinclair, Geoffrey Leech and Michael Hoey. The theoretical and methodological issues addressed in the volume demonstrate clearly the steady advance of an expanding discipline inspired by an empirical, usage-based approach to the study of language. The volume is essential reading for researchers and students interested in the use of computer corpora in linguistic research.ContentsKarin AIJMER and Bengt ALTENBERG: IntroductionI The role of corpora in linguistic researchM.A.K. HALLIDAY: The spoken language corpus: a foundation for grammatical theoryJohn SINCLAIR: Intuition and annotation – the discussion continuesGeoffrey LEECH: Recent grammatical change in English: data, desdription, theory II Exploring lexis, grammar and semanticsJoybrato MUKHERJEE: Corpus data in a usage-based cognitive grammarCaroline DAVID: Putting ‘putting verbs’ to the test of corporaPeter WILLEMSE: Esphoric reference and pseudo-definitenessJonathan CHARTERIS-BLACK: Why “an angel rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm”: A corpus-based comparative study of metaphor in British and American political discourse.Peter K.W. TAN, Vincent B.Y. OOI and Andy K.L. CHIANG: Signalling spokenness in personal advertisements on the Web: The case of ESL countries in South East Asia III Discourse and pragmaticsMichael HOEY: Textual colligation: a special kind of lexical primingHilde HASSELGÅRD: Adverbials in IT-cleft constructionsBernard De CLERCK: On the pragmatic functions of let’s utterancesIV Language change and language developmentThomas KOHNEN: Methodological problems in corpus-based historical pragmatics. The case of English directivesLieselotte BREMS: Measure noun constructions: degrees of delexicalization and grammaticalizationGöran KJELLMER: Yourself: a general-purpose emphatic-reflexive?Clive SOUTER: Aspects of spoken vocabulary development in the Polytechnic of Wales Corpus of Children’s EnglishRoumiana BLAGOEVA: Demonstrative reference as a cohesive device in advanced learner writing: a corpus-based studyV Cross-linguistic studiesHelge DYVIK: Translations as semantic mirrors: from parallel corpus to wordnetÅke VIBERG: Physical contact verbs in English and Swedish from the perspective of crosslinguistic lexicologyAnna-Lena FREDRIKSSON: Exploring theme contrastively: the choice of modelElena TOGNINI BONELLI and Elena MANCA: Welcoming children, pets and guests: towards functional equivalence in the langues of ‘Agriturismo’ and ‘Farmhouse Holidays’Natalie KÜBLER: Using WebCorp in the classroom for building specialized dictionariesVI Software developmentAntoinette RENOUF, Andrew KEHOE and David MEZUIRIZ: The accidental corpus: some issues in extracting linguistic information from the Web