This chapter focuses on the empirical basis of corpus linguistics, describing how linguistic corpora have played an important role in providing corpus linguists with linguistic evidence to support particular analyses of language. It opens with a discussion of how to define a corpus, and then traces the history of corpus linguistics, noting that as early as the fifteenth century, concordances were created based on the Bible. Later developments included the creation of the Quirk Corpus (print samples of spoken and written English) in 1955 at the Survey of English Usage in University College London, followed (in the 1960s) by the Brown Corpus (edited written American English). There are now online corpora, such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Tools for creating and analyzing corpora have also improved considerably: tagging corpora with part-of-speech information can be done with high levels of accuracy. The chapter closes with a description of the many different areas (e.g. lexicology and sociolinguistics) that have benefited from the use of linguistic corpora as well as a sample linguistic analysis demonstrating that corpus-based methodology and the theory of construction grammar can provide evidence that appositives in English are a type of construction.

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).

A civil dispute is one which arises between private parties (including governments acting in their private capacity) and excludes criminal prosecutions.

This chapter will introduce the themes and theory of civil dispute resolution (CDR) and explain the structure and limitations of this book to assist readers in navigating through the chapters. This chapter will also introduce the procedures for resolving civil disputes, each of which will be canvassed in more detail in subsequent chapters. While this book need not be read cover to cover, it is recommended that Chapters 1, 2 and 3 be read first as they are fundamental to understanding the remainder of the book.