The title of this book is Corpus Linguistics: Method, Theory and Practice. As that title may suggest, it is about how corpus linguistics has developed and is employed as a methodology; the major theoretical issues that corpus linguists contend with today; and the problems that researchers using corpora must grapple with in practice, both within linguistics and across disciplines.

This captures in a nutshell, we like to think, what makes this book different from the many excellent introductory textbooks on corpus linguistics that have appeared since the mid-1990s. Our purpose in writing this book is not to introduce the very basics of procedures in corpus linguistics – we do not outline any step-by-step instructions describing how to go about investigating a corpus, and though we do occasionally give some example corpus analyses, we do not go into the details of how to deal with concordances, collocations, keywords and other common outputs from corpus tools. Other books have covered this ground comprehensively (e.g. Biber et al. ; Hunston ; Adolphs ; McEnery et al. ; Hoffmann et al. ), and we do not see any need to duplicate these accounts.