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In the past forty years, electronic corpora have come to prominence as a resource used by linguists. While their use remains a source of debate and controversy to this day (see for example Newmeyer, 2003; Prodromou, 1997; Widdowson, 1991) their contribution to linguistics in general, and English linguistics in particular, as well as to language teaching, is now widely acknowledged. Corpus tools have not only strengthened the position of descriptive linguistics, but have also enhanced theoretically-oriented linguistic research. This contribution has been felt most strongly in English linguistics, as it was pioneering work undertaken on English language corpora, such as the Brown corpus (Francis & Kučera, 1964), which set the agenda for much of the work that has been undertaken using corpora since then. In this chapter we will examine the nature of corpus linguistics, review the general contribution of corpora to linguistic theory and then explore in more depth the contribution of corpora in four major areas: • language description in general, and the production of reference resources in particular; • lexicogrammar and the lexical approach to language analysis and description (lexical grammar); • the teaching of English as a foreign language; • the study of language change, with particular reference to the role that corpora have to play in theoretically informed accounts of language change.

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