This volume provides an overview of four currently booming areas in the discipline of corpus linguistics. The first section is concerned with studies of the history and development of morphological and syntactic phenomena in English, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese. The second section contains case studies investigating the functions and contexts of use of different morphological and syntactic forms in English, Spanish, Russian, and Mandarin Chinese. The third section contains studies in the field of genre and register from settings as diverse as health, call center, academic, and legal discourse. The final section features papers refining existing, and exploring new, corpus-linguistic methods: dispersions, text mining, corpus similarity, as well as the development of extraction patterns and the evaluation of tagging methods.

Contents Stefanie Wulff, Stefan Th. Gries, and Mark Davies: Introduction Diachronic applications Viola G. Miglio: Online databases and language change: the case of Spanish dizque Alfonso Medina Urrea: Toward a comparison of unsupervised diachronic morphological profiles Juhani Rudanko: Change and variation in complement selection: a case study from recent English, with evidence from large corpora Cristina Mota: Journalistic corpus similarity over time Function-oriented applications Georgie Columbus: “Ah lovely stuff, eh?” – invariant tag meanings and usage across three varieties of English Philip Dilts: Good nouns, bad nouns: what the corpus says and what native speakers think Tatiana Zdorenko: Subject omission in Russian: a study of the Russian National Corpus Register/genre applications Phuong Dzung Pho: Linguistic realizations of rhetorical structure: a corpus-based study of research article abstracts and introductions in applied linguistics and educational technology Eniko Csomay and Viviana Cortes: Lexical bundle distribution in university classroom talk Luciana Diniz: Suggestions and recommendations in academic speech Eileen Fitzpatrick and Joan Bachenko: Building a forensic corpus to test language-based indicators of deception Methodological applications Stefan Th. Gries: Dispersions and adjusted frequencies in corpora: further explorations Christopher Cox: Probabilistic tagging of minority language data: a case study using Qtag Elke Teich and Peter Fankhauser: Exploring a corpus of scientific texts using data mining Kenneth Bloom and Shlomo Argamon: Automated learning of appraisal extraction patterns