Any research question or application relating to language variation and/or use can be approached from a corpus linguistic perspective. The goals of The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics (CHECL) are to survey the breadth of these research questions and applications in relation to the linguistic study of English. The handbook addresses a range of topics, including chapters on lexical variation, grammatical variation, historical change, online language and social media, multimodal corpora, the linguistic description of dialects and registers, and applications to language teaching and translation. In each chapter, authors assess what we have learned from corpus-based investigations to date and provide detailed case studies that illustrate how corpus analyses can be employed for empirical descriptions, documenting surprising patterns of language use that are often unanticipated previously. By bringing together diverse perspectives and cutting-edge research, this volume serves as a comprehensive resource for researchers seeking to understand and apply a corpus-based approach to the study of English.

This chapter extends all the features of the Sz.-Nagy–Foias model theory to the bivariate setting. We introduce the notion of a characteristic triple. The characteristic triple for a commuting contractive pair consists of the Sz.-Nagy–Foias characteristic function for the product of the components of the given commuting contractive pair, the fundamental-operator pair introduced in Chapter 7, and the canonical commuting unitary pair introduced in Chapter 4. The characteristic triple for a commuting contractive pair is shown to be a complete unitary invariant for the commuting contractive pair. Thus the characteristic triple serves as the analogue of the Sz.-Nagy–Foias characteristic function for the univariate case. This chapter also introduces the notion of admissible triples, which is equipped with a natural equivalence relation called "coincidence" inspired by the Sz.-Nagy–Foias notion of coincidence between two contractive analytic functions. It is shown that an admissible triple gives rise to a commuting contractive pair on a functional model space, whose characteristic triple coincides with the prespecified admissible triple. Joint invariant subspaces are characterized.

This chapter examines how commercial firms like the Belgian grocer Delhaize did not initially respond to the Single Market Program in the mid-1980s, but they did mobilize swiftly in the late 1980s to prepare for the "threat" of the new business and regulatory environment of an integrated regional market governed by social and environmental protections. Together with other food retailers, Delhaize formed sectoral clubs and associations to defend its interests: Buying clubs collectivized price negotiating power against producer consolidation and protected profit margins, while interest associations brought distributors and retailers together to influence European policymaking. At the same time, Delhaize and other commercial firms saw in the opening of Eastern Europe a profitable business opportunity, and they expanded quickly into the markets of Poland, Hungary, and the new Czech Republic in the early 1990s. As a result, the case of Delhaize gives us purchase on the complexity of business responses to market integration and demonstrates the diverse paths to regionalization for and against the Single Market.

Timothy S. Murphy explores William Burroughs’ oeuvre as a “singularity” in three overlapping senses: aesthetic uniqueness, philosophical resistance to generalization, and cosmological metaphor. Burroughs’ cut-up novels – Naked Lunch, The Nova Trilogy, and beyond – embody a form of narrative experimentation that resists categorization and disrupts conventional literary logic. Drawing on concepts from astrophysics, Murphy aligns Burroughs’ work with the disruptive force of black holes, novae, and supernovae. Through a close reading of the trilogy’s stellar metaphors, especially the figure of Mr. Bradly Mr. Martin, Murphy argues that Burroughs anticipates a model of narrative that is both destructive and generative – annihilating fixed identities and control structures while offering the possibility of linguistic and ontological renewal. The “Burroughs singularity,” codenamed WSB X-1, represents a continual feedback loop between collapse and creation, producing texts as unstable, irradiated, and transformative as the cosmic phenomena they metaphorically invoke.

Drawing on archival sources from Paribas as well as published statements from bank chairmen Jean-Yves Haberer, Michel François-Poncet and André Lévy-Lang, this chapter examines Paribas in the European economy of the 1980s and 1990s, the evolution of the bank’s business strategy amid the macroeconomic changes of market integration and market openings, and the bank’s perspectives on the Single Market and banking regulation in European economic governance. If carmakers like Volkswagen and BMW expressed enthusiasm about the business opportunities of the Single Market Program for their supply chains, production, and distribution and even supported the EEC’s efforts to develop environmental regulations, merchant banks like Paribas seemed rather ambivalent and even directly opposed to the regulatory and social dimensions of market integration through their lobbying efforts and business interest associations. In the early 1990s, the opening of Central and Eastern Europe presented new investment and growth opportunities making Paribas much more interested in business opportunities in Central and Eastern Europe, the “CEE,” than in the business environment of the EEC and its Single Market.

This chapter provides a critical overview of how L2 researchers have used measures of lexical and phraseological complexity, with a special focus on their definition and operationalization. Lexical and phraseological complexity are often measured in terms of diversity (the number of different words or multi-word units respectively) and sophistication (the number of ‘sophisticated’ words or multi-word units, with ‘sophisticated’ variously understood as less frequent, more specialized, or in the case of phraseological sophistication, as more strongly associated word combinations). With the development of natural language processing (NLP) tools such as the Lexical Complexity Analyzer (Lu, 2012) or the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Lexical Sophistication (Kyle et al., 2018), L2 researchers can now analyze lexical complexity in L2 English texts using dozens or even hundreds of measures with a click of a button. However, unresolved questions remain: How accurate, reliable, and valid are these measures across learner samples and research contexts? Can they assess L2 proficiency across registers? How should measures be selected from the many available? By contrast, do the current, limited set of measures of phraseological complexity represent the full construct, or is there a need to develop for further development?

Burroughs’ writing is widely interpreted to depict existence in terms of universal addiction, and a fight against it. This chapter shows the extent to which drug use in his life and work lies outside this simplistic model. His ‘Algebra of Need’ polemics are shown to belong to a specific period, and an account of his career with drugs outlines his opiate use; his excursion into hallucinogens, notably yagé, as psychic exploration; and his chosen literary precursors, notably De Quincey. Burroughs became more comfortable with his dependency in later life, and he finally emphasizes drug use, particularly in an American historical context, as a libertarian political issue. The chapter notes his depiction of drug experience as a potentially valuable subjective space, together with nostalgia and dreaming, and suggests that a common denominator throughout his changing stances on drugs is freedom: not only from addiction, but from the body, and from social control.

The chapter explores the legal and transactional governance of venture capital (VC) from the viewpoint of the theory of the firm as a knowledge commons. At first sight, VC seems far removed from any notion of commons, if that is taken to mean a shared resource constituted by emergent rules of conduct based on interactions between multiple stakeholders. Bright line rules favouring the interests of capital holders over those of producers and communities dominate the orthodox legal account of VC, which stresses the importance of US-style transactional flexibility in managing investment risks. On closer inspection, however, VC ecosystems have many commons-like aspects, involving risk-sharing, information pooling, and the braiding of formal and informal rules. The public benefits of VC depend on the positive externalities generated by knowledge spillovers, which cannot be fully captured by private ordering. Understanding these features through Masahiko Aoki’s theory of the firm as embedded cognition, and drawing on interviews with mostly Europe-based VC funds, entrepreneurs and legal advisers, the chapter argues that the governance of VC should be concerned with maximising the net social return from innovation, taking into account the multiple interests involved in knowledge creation and preservation.

As young people progress from primary school, through secondary, and, for many, on to university, they gain knowledge, develop skills, and learn to relate to others in ways that remain influential throughout their lives. Language is central to this process. At each educational stage, students need to understand and express new types of content to new audiences in new contexts. For some, this offers a rich opportunity for language growth. For many, however, academic language is a barrier that can seriously hamper their educational and life chances. Understanding language development at school and university is therefore central both to understanding linguistic, and sociocognitive development and to achieving a socially just education. This chapter reviews the contribution that corpus research has made and can make to understanding educational writing. It reviews the main foci of research, critically evaluates its methods, summarizes our current state of knowledge, and suggests directions for future work. It then looks in detail at one project, led by the author, that researched the grammar and vocabulary of children in schools in England. It highlights central findings and reflects on methodological strengths and weaknesses and on what lessons might be learned for future research.

This chapter explores William Burroughs’s literary and theoretical engagement with the virus as a figure of both destruction and transformation. Drawing on works such as The Cities of Red Night, Naked Lunch, and Ghost of Chance, this chapter examines how Burroughs reimagines parasitical entities – not solely as biological threats but as units of language, ideology, and cultural transmission. Situating Burroughs’ writing alongside scientific thought and postmodern theory, the essay conducts a close reading of Burroughs’ lectures on the virus at the City College of New York in 1974, exploring the virus as a liminal force capable of mutating identity, dissolving fixed moral binaries, and challenging notions of agency and autonomy. Burroughs’s fascination with symbiosis and parasitism, both literal and metaphorical, reveals a vision of the self as shaped by infectious systems: genetic, linguistic, and media-based. Ultimately, the essay argues that Burroughs seeks not just to expose viral control but to become a viral force himself, rewriting perception through a radical reprogramming of language and consciousness.

This chapter focuses on learner corpora of L2 English and the analysis of learner language varieties. The first part of the chapter describes the main characteristics of learner corpus data and presents a survey of the aspects that have most often been dealt with in the literature within the frame of learner corpus research (LCR) and its three main research orientations (descriptive, predictive, and pedagogical). A number of representative studies are selected to illustrate various facets of LCR. The chapter then describes the methods that are typically used in LCR, including multimethod approaches. It identifies the recent advances in LCR as well as the challenges that it still needs to address in terms of data collection, methodology, linguistic analysis, and applications. In the second part of the chapter, the main aspects of LCR are illustrated in an empirical study that the authors conducted on the use of discourse markers (DMs) in learner spoken English. The study compares six frequent two-word DMs (and so, and then, I mean, in fact, sort of, you know) in native and learner speech, both from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. The study considers individual texts in addition to entire corpora, showing that corpora may display a high degree of internal variability.