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
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
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-
Matti Rissanen: Corpora and the study of the history of English.
Elizabeth Closs Traugott: The status of onset contexts in analysis of micro-