When we set out to write this book, we were faced with many possible goals and emphases. We could have, for instance, presented the history of research done within a corpus-based framework, surveying studies up to the current state-of-the-art. Or we could have concentrated on simple corpus-based studies that readers could conduct on their own. Or we could have focused purely on the methods and analytical techniques required for corpus analysis. Although we give attention to all of these areas, they are not the central focus of this book. Instead, we chose to write a book that reflects the reasons for our own enthusiasm for corpus-based research: this is a book about language as well as corpus linguistics, showing how empirical investigations of corpora can shed new light on previously intractable research questions in linguistics.

In the past several years, on-line corpora and analysis tools have become increasingly accessible, and corpus-based studies have become increasingly common. However, many aspects of corpus-based research remain mysterious for readers, since research articles can rarely afford the space to discuss methodological considerations or analytical procedures in complete detail. In addition, researchers are just now learning how to fully exploit the resources of representative text corpora, and as a result, they are also becoming aware of the many new research questions that can be investigated through corpus-based research.