Corpus-Based Investigations of Language Use
Douglas Biber, Susan Conrad, Randi Reppen · Annual Review of Applied Linguistics · 1996
On a basic level, there are two main areas of study within linguistics: language structure and language use. Language practioners as well as theoreticians must be concerned with both areas; that is, they need a full understanding of the structural resources available in a language as well as analyses of what speakers and writers actually do with those resources. Investigations of a representative text corpus—a principled collection of texts stored on computer—provide important insights into both of these domains and open new avenues of inquiry.