Corpus Linguistics has quickly established itself as the leading undergraduate course book in the subject. This second edition takes full account of the latest developments in the rapidly changing field, making this the most up-to-date and comprehensive textbook available. It gives a step-by-step introduction to what a corpus is, how corpora are constructed, and what can be done with them. Each chapter ends with a section of study questions that contain practical corpus-based exercises. * Designed for student use, with all technical terms explained in the text and referenced further in a Glossary * Examples are taken from existing corpora; detailed case study chapter included * Contains end-of-chapter summaries, study questions and suggestions for further reading * Updated reviews of new studies, areas that have recently come to prominence and new directions in corpus encoding and annotation standards * Detailed coverage of multilingual corpus construction and use * An in-depth historical review of computer-based corpora from the 1940s to the present day * Helpful appendices include answers to the study questions, up-to-date information on where corpora can be found, and the latest software for corpus research.