Corpus Linguistics: Method, Theory and Practice. Tony McEnery and Andrew Hardie.

Abstract

Cambridge University Press already has three general books on corpus linguistics—Biber, Conrad and Reppen (1998), Meyer (2002), Hunston (2002)—so what does this new addition to the CUP catalogue provide that the others do not? As McEnery and Hardie explain in their preface, this book is not intended as an introduction to the practicalities of how to work with output from corpus analysis tools, such as concordance lines and lists of keywords. Instead, and here lies the book’s distinctness, it concentrates on delivering rich discussions of fundamental conceptual issues and of the key trends in corpus linguistics, along with an account of how corpus linguistics has evolved and the major centres of development, with the main focus placed on English corpus linguistics. The book is clearly a textbook—it has activities at the end of each chapter and a comprehensive (and lucid) glossary. The activities provided are stimulating and refreshingly generic (that is, they are not tied to particular worked examples, or to a single corpus or corpus analysis tool). There is also a website accompanying the book, which will provide answers to activities, extensions to some footnotes, updates to the book, and links to related websites; at the time of reading (17th January 2013), however, several parts of the website contained a message ‘Coming soon!’ last updated 31st October 2011. This lack of content is a shame because the concept and design of the companion website are good.