Doing Linguistics with a Corpus: Methodological Considerations for the Everyday User

Paradoxically, doing corpus linguistics is both easier and harder than it has ever been before. On the one hand, it is easier because we have access to more existing corpora, more corpus analysis software tools, and more statistical methods than ever before. On the other hand, reliance on these existing corpora and corpus linguistic methods can potentially create layers of distance between the researcher and the language in a corpus, making it a challenge to do linguistics with a corpus. Th...