The chapters in this collected volume illuminate the dynamic success story of English corpus linguistics over the past few decades. The book is organised in three parts. The chapters in Part I set the scene by addressing fundamental issues such as the balance between automated and manual analyses, and the urgent call for more communication and collaboration across subjects and research areas. The studies in Part II highlight patterns in Present-day English from a cross-linguistic perspective, and identify and analyse stylistic trends in recent English. Part III is devoted to aspects of the rich variation and long-term change characteristic of early English. Two themes cut across the chapters in the book. One of them is the impressive volume and diversity of digitised material available for English corpus linguists today and the issues that arise for researchers wishing to combine different data sources in their analyses. The other theme concerns the benefits that advances made in English corpus linguistics may offer to other disciplines.

Contents Merja Kytö: Introduction. 'Setting the scene' Anne Curzan: The electronic life of texts: insights from corpus linguistics for all fields of English. Charles F. Meyer: Textual analysis: from philology to corpus linguistics 'Focus on Present-day and recent English' Stig Johansson: Cross-linguistic perspectives. Geoffrey Leech, Nicholas Smith and Paul Rayson: English style on the move: variation and change in stylistic norms in the twentieth century. 'Focus on early English' Laurel J. Brinton: Historical pragmatics and corpus linguistics: problems and strategies. Claudia Claridge: ‘Upon these 'Heads' I shall discourse’: lexicographical and corpus evidence for senses and phrases. Thomas Kohnen: Prayers in the history of English: a corpus-based study. Ian Lancashire: Semantic drift in Shakespeare, and Early Modern English full- text corpora. Matti Rissanen: Corpora and the study of the history of English. Elizabeth Closs Traugott: The status of onset contexts in analysis of micro- changes.