6.2 Lindquist (2009)

Hans Lindquist’s work Corpus Linguistics and the Description of English is a textbook written for university students of English at intermediate to advanced levels (cf. 2009: XVI). It presents all necessary information about the usage of corpora for linguistic research and begins with a discussion of the methodology from a historical point of view. Central concepts in corpus linguistics such as frequency, representativeness and statistical significance are covered as well as specific areas of English such as words, phrases and metaphors. Additionally, study questions and examples, also available on a companion website, are provided to guide the reader during the research process. In brief, the book is an easily accessible guide with clear instructions and various examples that gives a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the wide field of corpus based linguistic studies.

Terms which are only roughly explained in the glossary here or any problems, for instance, concerning the use of concordancers or the comparison of frequencies, are all elaborated and clarified by Lindquist in detail. Since the book introduces all kinds of corpora, however, the information on “historical (diachronic) corpora” is virtually confined to some basic facts about the HC and the Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts (cf. Lindquist 2009: 19-20). Nevertheless, chapter 9, which deals with language change, gives a good impression of the possibilities of using both historical and general corpora for conducting diachronic studies. In doing so, it shows examples from the ARCHER and HC corpora (cf. Lindquist 2009: 169-180). Additionally, it gives an insight into using the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as a corpus, which opens up a new option for studying diachronic change (cf. Lindquist 2009: 180; cf. also chapter 7 and the corresponding companion website). However, the book does not contain any specific information about historical literature databases.

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