What is the corpus?
Corpus linguistics is an applied linguistics approach that has become one of the dominant methods used to analyze language today. Biberetal. (1998) describe corpus linguistics as having four main features;
1) it is an empirical (experiment-based) approach in which patterns of language use that are observed in reallanguage texts (spoken and written) are analyzed .
2) it uses a representative sample of the target language stored as an electronic database (a corpus) as the basis for the analysis.
3) it relies on computer software to count linguistics patterns as part of the analysis.
4) it depends on both quantitative and qualitative analytical techniques to interpret the findings.
