Designing and Evaluating Language Corpora

Corpora are ubiquitous in linguistic research, yet to date, there has been no consensus on how to conceptualize corpus representativeness and collect corpus samples. This pioneering book bridges this gap by introducing a conceptual and methodological framework for corpus design and representativeness. Written by experts in the field, it shows how corpora can be designed and built in a way that is both optimally suited to specific research agendas, and adequately representative of the types of language use in question. It considers questions such as 'what types of texts should be included in the corpus?', and 'how many texts are required?' – highlighting that the degree of representativeness rests on the dual pillars of domain considerations and distribution considerations. The authors introduce, explain, and illustrate all aspects of this corpus representativeness framework in a step-by-step fashion, using examples and activities to help readers develop practical skills in corpus design and evaluation.

Jesse Egbert is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at Northern Arizona University. He is a co-founding General Editor of Register Studies, and his recent books focus on online register variation (2018), methodogical triangulation (2016, 2020), and corpus linguistics methods (2020).

Douglas Biber is Regents' Professor of Applied Linguistics at Northern Arizona University. Previous books include Register, Genre, and Style (2009/2019), Grammar of Spoken and Written English (2021), and studies of register variation (1988, 1995, 2018).

Bethany Gray is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics and Technology at Iowa State University. Her publications include monographs on academic research articles (2015), historical change in writing (2016). She is a co-founding General Editor of Register Studies.