We show that empirical corpus-based research is prevalent across subdisciplines of (applied) linguistics, not just in “corpus linguistics” journals. We define a corpus as a large, principled sample of texts designed to represent a target domain of language use. Corpus representativeness is conceptualized as the extent to which a corpus permits accurate and meaningful generalizations about linguistic patterns that are typical in a domain. Corpus representativeness involves two main considerations, which are both relative to the linguistic research goal of interest: domain considerations (adequate representation of the text varieties in the domain), and distribution considerations (adequate representation of the distribution of linguistic features in the domain).