The use and uses of linguistic corpora in applied linguistics have expanded rapidly over the past 20 years, in part because of the advent of improved, more accessible systems of electronic storage and analysis, and also because of an ever-growing appreciation of the huge potential of corpus work. Among the pioneers in this effort has been the team in the English Department at the University of Birmingham, led for many years by Professor John Sinclair, and known among other things for its prolific publications surrounding the COBUILD Project. Dr Susan Hunston has long been a core member of that team, including several years as a Senior Grammarian with COBUILD, and has steadily become one of corpus analysis' most widely recognised experts. In Corpora in Applied Linguistics, she provides an original and authoritative introduction to modern uses of corpus studies, and does so in a clear fashion that will appeal to a wide range of readers.

After a lucid introduction to the scope and limitations of modern corpus work, including research on frequency, phraseology, and collocation, Dr Hunston defines some of the basic issues surrounding the construction and evaluation of corpora in chapter 2. These include questions concerning the size, content, representativeness, and stability of corpora over time, and such matters as the relative merits of corpora designed as collections of texts and as collections of language samples, in turn reflecting how and for what purposes corpora are investigated.