Exploring Corpus Linguistics: Language in Action

Abstract

Corpus linguistics has become an indispensable part of language research in that ‘corpus linguistics has the potential to reorient our entire approach to the study of language. It may refine and redefine a range of theories of language’ (McEnery and Hardie 2012: 1). The aim of the book under review is to discuss ‘a wide range of questions that corpus linguistics is able to answer more accurately and effectively, and other questions that only corpus linguistics can answer’ (p. 8). Since use of corpus is relatively technology intensive, it may cause apprehension among some students, teachers, and researchers. To allay the apprehension, the author designed many guided practices with detailed explanations. Thus, the book may serve well as an introductory textbook for postgraduate students of applied linguistics and a reference for researchers who are new to the area of corpus linguistics. The eight chapters of the book are grouped into three parts. Part I consists of the first two chapters, which present the problems and practices of corpus linguistics. Chapter 1 briefly introduces what corpus is and what corpus linguistics is. The author comes straight to the point in this chapter stating that she subscribes to the corpus-driven approach and holds that corpus linguistics is more of a discipline in its own right than a methodology (p. 6). This point, therefore, is the theoretical foundation of the book. Chapter 2, ‘Linguistic inquiries’, discusses topics of concern in the areas of linguistics and applied linguistics such as features of spoken and written language, new uses and meanings of words, grammar, lexical semantics, conversation analysis, genre analysis, pragmatics, and language in various contexts of situation. The author concludes the chapter by arguing that it is important to integrate corpus approaches into these research areas of linguistics.