Corpus Linguistics and the Description of English (Edinburgh Textbooks on the English Language - Advanced) - Softcover

Lindquist's 'Corpus Linguistics and the Description of English' is an excellent book for anyone wishing to become acquainted with corpus linguistics and its wide range of applications. As it can be read either from cover to cover or perused selectively, it is suitable for many types of readers. -- Marlies Gabriele Prinzl LINGUIST list While it assumes a certain amount of background knowledge in grammar and linguistics, the textbook is accessible and sets a good pace for most readers who have an interest in learning how to use electronic corpora and in establishing what can be discovered through corpus research and analysis. Lindquist's book is organised clearly and uses interesting stepby-step examples to illustrate the benefits and limitations of corpus linguistics. Numerous tables and charts throughout the book make the author's examples meaningful and applicable. Each chapter includes study questions, online corpus exercises and suggestions for further reading. As a result of its hands-on approach and accessible prose, this book will be useful and enjoyable for students who are curious about language and intrigued by the capacity of corpora as a tool to investigate it. It offers informative and exciting step-by-step analyses that demonstrate how to use electronic corpora and what linguists can do with the results. The many graphs and charts not only explain the results of the searches conducted for this book, but also demonstrate to readers how to report the results of the studies they may conduct in future. Students will be excited to follow Lindquist as he describes how to investigate language using electronic corpora, and will be sufficiently well versed in the discussion of corpus data to analyse meaningfully and successfully their own data. -- Stacey Wizner, Qatar University Corpora Lindquist's 'Corpus Linguistics and the Description of English' is an excellent book for anyone wishing to become acquainted with corpus linguistics and its wide range of applications. As it can be read either from cover to cover or perused selectively, it is suitable for many types of readers. While it assumes a certain amount of background knowledge in grammar and linguistics, the textbook is accessible and sets a good pace for most readers who have an interest in learning how to use electronic corpora and in establishing what can be discovered through corpus research and analysis. Lindquist's book is organised clearly and uses interesting stepby-step examples to illustrate the benefits and limitations of corpus linguistics. Numerous tables and charts throughout the book make the author's examples meaningful and applicable. Each chapter includes study questions, online corpus exercises and suggestions for further reading. As a result of its hands-on approach and accessible prose, this book will be useful and enjoyable for students who are curious about language and intrigued by the capacity of corpora as a tool to investigate it. It offers informative and exciting step-by-step analyses that demonstrate how to use electronic corpora and what linguists can do with the results. The many graphs and charts not only explain the results of the searches conducted for this book, but also demonstrate to readers how to report the results of the studies they may conduct in future. Students will be excited to follow Lindquist as he describes how to investigate language using electronic corpora, and will be sufficiently well versed in the discussion of corpus data to analyse meaningfully and successfully their own data.

A lively hands-on introduction to the use of electronic corpora in the description and analysis of English, this book provides an ideal introduction for university students of English at the intermediate level. Students planning papers, dissertations or theses will find the book a particularly valuable guide. After introducing corpora and the rationale and basic methodology of corpus linguistics, the author presents a number of case studies providing new insights into vocabulary, collocations, phraseology, metaphor and metonymy, syntactic structures, male and female language, and language change. In a final chapter it is shown how the web can be used as a source for linguistic investigations. Each chapter has study questions, exercises and suggestions for further reading. Students will benefit from the book's *Clear language and structure *Well-defined terminology *Step-by-step instructions *Generous, up-to-date exemplification from different varieties of English around the world *Accompanying web-page with exercises and updated information about freely accessible corpora.