What is corpus linguistics (I)

? Corpus linguistics is a method of carrying out linguistic analyses. As it can be

used for the investigation of many kinds of linguistic questions and as it has been
shown to have the potential to yield highly interesting, fundamental, and often
surprising new insights about language, it has become one of the most widespread methods of linguistic investigation in recent years.
What is a corpus? A corpus can be defined as a systematic collection of
naturally occurring texts (of both written and spoken language). Systematic
means that the structure and contents of the corpus follows certain
extralinguistic principles (sampling principles, i.e. principles on the basis of
which the texts included were chosen).
A corpus is [the name given to] a set of texts which has been put together
for some purpose, usually (though not necessarily), in computer-readable
form (Wray, Trott & Bloomer, 1990:213).

What is corpus linguistics (II)? Corpus linguistics thus is the analysis of

naturally occurring language on the basis of computerized corpora. Usually, the
analysis is performed with the help of the computer, i.e. with specialised
software, and takes into account the frequency of the phenomena investigated.
McEnery and Wilson (2001:1) describe corpus linguistics as the study of
language based on examples of real life language use.