The present volume includes a selection of 20 papers from the 31st Annual Conference of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME), held in Giessen (Germany) in May 2010. The conference topic was “Corpus linguistics and variation in English”. All the papers included in the present Conference Proceedings capture aspects of variation in language use on the basis of corpus analyses, providing new descriptive insights, and/or new methods of utilising corpora for the description of language variation. Of particular interest are the five plenary papers that are included in the present volume, focusing on corpus-based approaches to variation in language from different disciplinary perspectives: Stefan Th. Gries (quantitative-statistical descriptions of variation and corpora), Michaela Mahlberg (stylistic variation and corpora), Miriam Meyerhoff (variational sociolinguistics and corpora), Edgar W. Schneider (regional variation and corpora) and Elizabeth C. Traugott (historical variation/grammaticalization and corpora).

Contents: Joybrato Mukherjee and Magnus Huber: Introduction: Corpus linguistics and variation in English Gisle Andersen: Listenership in polylogic discourse Marina Bondi and Corrado Seidenari: "and now I’m finally of the mind to say i hope the whole ship goes down…": Markers of subjectivity and evaluative phraseology in blogs Doris R. Dant: Using COCA to evaluate "The Chicago Manual of Style"’s usage prescriptions Stefan Th. Gries: Corpus linguistics, theoretical linguistics, and cognitive/psycholinguistics: Towards more and more fruitful exchanges Hans Martin Lehmann and Gerold Schneider: Syntactic variation and lexical preference in the dative-shift alternation Michaela Mahlberg: The corpus stylistic analysis of fiction – or the fiction of corpus stylistics? Manfred Markus: How can Joseph Wright’s "English Dialect Dictionary" be used as a corpus? Miriam Meyerhoff: Uncovering hidden constraints in micro-corpora of contact Englishes Hagen Peukert: Hidden structures in English corpora Thomas Proisl: Automatically exploring lexical tendencies in English Paula Rodríguez-Abruñeiras: Exemplifying constructions with "for example" and "for instance" as markers: A historical account Patricia Ronan: Modal "would" as a pragmatic softener in ICE Ireland Juhani Rudanko: “Talked the council out of adopting any resolution”: On the transitive "out of –ing" construction in American English Edgar W. Schneider: Tracking the evolution of vernaculars: Corpus linguistics and earlier Southern US Englishes Stefania Spina: Methodological issues in a television news corpus: Discourse and annotation Michael Stubbs: Corpora and texts: Lexis and text structure Elizabeth Closs Traugott: On the persistence of ambiguous linguistic contexts over time: Implications for corpus research on micro-changes Turo Vartiainen and Jefrey Lijffijt: Premodifying "-ing" participles in the parsed BNC