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As the first collective volume to focus exclusively on corpus-based approaches to register variation, the chapters herein provide an exhaustive account of the range and depth of possibilities that the vast domain of register variation in English has to offer.

This book showcases eleven studies dealing with corpora and the changing society. The theme of the volume reflects the fact that changes in society lead to changes in language and vice versa. Focusing on the English language, be it from Old English to the present, or a shorter time span in the immediate past, the contributors in this volume use a variety of corpus methods to address the two patterns of change. The cross-fertilization of cultural studies and corpus linguistics, we hope, is beneficial for both parties, as corpus linguistics offers a vast array of materials and methods to investigate cultural and societal change, while cultural studies provide the theoretical background on which to build our research. The studies included in the present volume illustrate the potential avenues and the merits of combining changing language and changing societies.

This volume presents a snapshot of the current state of the art of research in English corpus linguistics. It contains selected papers from the 40th ICAME conference in 2019 and features contributions from experts in synchronic, diachronic, and contrastive linguistics, as well as in sociolinguistics, phonetics, discourse analysis, and learner language. The volume showcases the particular strengths of research in the ICAME tradition. The papers in this volume offer new insights from the reanalysis of new data types, methodological refinements and advancements of quantitative analysis, and from taking new perspectives on ongoing debates in their respective fields.

This volume is witness to a spirited and fruitful period in the evolution of corpus linguistics. In twenty-two articles written by established corpus linguists, members of the ICAME (International Computer Archive of Modern and Mediaeval English) association, this new volume brings the reader up to date with the cycle of activities which make up this field of study as it is today, dealing with corpus creation, language varieties, diachronic corpus study from the past to present, present-day synchronic corpus study, the web as corpus, and corpus linguistics and grammatical theory. It thus serves as a valuable guide to the state of the art for linguistic researchers, teachers and language learners of all persuasions. After over twenty years of evolution, corpus linguistics has matured, incorporating nowadays not just small, medium and large primary corpus building but also specialised and multi-dimensional secondary corpus building; not just corpus analysis, but also corpus evaluation; not just an initial application of theory, but self-reflection and a new concern with theory in the light of experience. The volume also highlights the growing emphasis on language as a changing phenomenon, both in terms of established historical study and the newer short-range diachronic study of 20th century and current English; and the growing area of overlap between these two. Another section of the volume illustrates the recent changes in the definition of 'corpus' which have come about due to the emergence of new technologies and in particular of the availability of texts on the world wide web. The volume culminates in the contributions by a group of corpus grammarians to a timely and novel discussion panel on the relationship between corpus linguistics and grammatical theory.

Extending the scope of corpus-based research: new applications, new challenges is a collection of articles which highlights some of the challenges facing English Corpus Linguistics at the beginning of the 21st century and shows how these challenges are being addressed by researchers. In sections on corpus methodology, language description and foreign language learning and teaching, researchers address a broad range of topics from methodological standardization, experimental research design, tagging and parsing corpora and the value of enriched corpus annotation to web-based research, tools for analysing language on the web and language learning via an Internet Grammar. There is a broad spectrum of research encompassing grammatical and lexical analyses of different varieties of early and Modern English, bilingual code switching, learner English and theoretical and practical approaches to the 0-d spoken medium. As such, the collection offers a global, up-to-date appreciation of theoretical and practical issues which will be of value to researchers in many areas of English Linguistics.

This paper describes the thematic variation observed in two newspaper genres - news reports and commentaries - in English and Spanish and studies the influence of genre-specific and language-specific constraints on the observed variation. The study is based on the contrastive analysis of certain clausal and discourse-thematic features in a bilingual comparable corpus consisting of a total of thirty-two texts (sixteen news reports and sixteen commentaries), evenly divided into English and Spanish texts. The analysis shows that despite the language-specific features which can be observed in certain thematic selections at clause level, most of the clausal and discourse thematic differences in the material can be related to the different communicative purposes which characterize these two genres. In view of the similarities and statistically significant differences between the two genres in both languages, it is suggested that genre is the major factor affecting the thematic variation in the bilingual sample, while language-specific differences play a secondary role.