This book presents a richly illustrated, hands-on discussion of one of the fastest growing fields in linguistics today. The authors address key methodological issues in corpus linguistics, such as collocations, keywords and the categorization of concordance lines. They show how these topics can be explored step-by-step with "BNCweb", a user-friendly web-based tool that supports sophisticated analyses of the 100-million-word British National Corpus. Indeed, the BNC and "BNCweb" have been described by Geoffrey Leech as "an unparalleled combination of facilities for finding out about the English language of the present day" (Foreword). The book contains tasks and exercises, and is suitable for undergraduates, postgraduates and experienced corpus users alike.

Contents: Reference guide to "BNCweb", a user-friendly, web-based interface to the British National Corpus (key features include: collocations, frequency distribution, keywords) - Practical guide to methodology, covering both quantitative and qualitative analysis of corpora - Query language reference