This chapter introduces the fields in the digital humanities concerned with words, texts, and documents, from textual editing to topic modelling and corpus linguistics.

This chapter sets out the book’s aim: an attempt to map the changing lexicons of Christian expression in the English language from the end of the Middle Ages to the early Victorians. It is thus a contribution to historical theolinguistics, drawing on the one hand on corpus linguistics and, on the other, the history of the many varieties of English Christianity that existed during this period. The methodology to be adopted in the body of the book is then illustrated with reference to two contrasting groups of female writers active in the middle of the seventeenth century, a period of exceptional religious turmoil: Fifth Monarchists and Quakers. The special analytic tools and resources harnessed include the Oxford English Dictionary, Semantic EEBO, Glasgow’s Historical Thesaurus of English, UCREL’s Log-Likelihood Calculator, and Sheffield’s Linguistic DNA. The remainder of the chapter defines notions and addresses issues that will recur later in the book: notions of register and genre, and questions to do with the handling of corpora, and with the structuring of religious ‘communities of practice’.

Any research question or application relating to language variation and/or use can be approached from a corpus linguistic perspective. The goals of The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics (CHECL) are to survey the breadth of these research questions and applications in relation to the linguistic study of English. The handbook addresses a range of topics, including chapters on lexical variation, grammatical variation, historical change, online language and social media, multimodal corpora, the linguistic description of dialects and registers, and applications to language teaching and translation. In each chapter, authors assess what we have learned from corpus-based investigations to date and provide detailed case studies that illustrate how corpus analyses can be employed for empirical descriptions, documenting surprising patterns of language use that are often unanticipated previously. By bringing together diverse perspectives and cutting-edge research, this volume serves as a comprehensive resource for researchers seeking to understand and apply a corpus-based approach to the study of English.

This chapter provides an overview of multimodal corpora, highlighting their significance in analyzing communication that integrates various modes such as speech, gesture, and gaze. The chapter defines both a mode and a multimodal corpus before introducing key types of multimodal corpora, including video-recorded interactions, corpora of signed languages, and datasets combining text and images. Prominent examples of multimodal corpora such as the ViMELF, FreMIC, and AMI corpora showcase the variety of multimodal corpora that exist and the various techniques employed to construct multimodal corpora. Challenges in constructing and annotating multimodal corpora are discussed, including temporal alignment, manual annotation efforts, and data-sharing limitations due to privacy concerns. The chapter emphasizes the importance of tailoring multimodal corpora to specific research questions while acknowledging the trade-offs of specialization. Advancements in technology, such as automated tagging and collaborative tools, are proposed as potential solutions to enhance accessibility and interoperability. A case study on turn management in virtual meetings illustrates the application of multimodal analysis, offering insights into how participants request and allocate turns in mediated contexts. The chapter serves as a guide for researchers navigating the methodological complexities of multimodal corpus-based studies.

This chapter examines applications of corpus linguistics in language teaching and learning. It opens with the main stakeholders – for developers upstream and for teachers in and out of class. The main focus is on learners who can interact more or less directly with corpus tools and techniques in what has come to be known as data-driven learning (DDL). Following a chronology of DDL research, it then discusses various syntheses to see what they can tell us about the approach, and meta-analyses for a quantitative understanding of what it can bring. Though the overall picture is generally positive, the overview allows a critical step back on a number of issues to date concerning both primary and secondary research. It suggests leads for future studies, in terms of under-researched areas as well as improvements needed in methodologies. It concludes with a word on generative AI and its possible impact as a disruptive technology in this area.

This chapter examines corpus-based research on intonation and prosodic features, focusing on tune patterns, f0 range, intonational phrasing, and speech rate, alongside tools, annotation systems, and corpus linguistic methods. It highlights multidimensional analysis (MDA; Biber, 1988) and the integration of linguistic and extra-linguistic factors (e.g., gender, speaking style; Gut, 2009; Staples & Puga, 2022; McClellan, 2024), addressing challenges and solutions in these areas. To illustrate research in this area, the case study using Staples and Puga’s (2022) data demonstrates the integration of prosody, fluency, and lexico-grammatical features via MDA, offering insights into functional language use among L1 and L2 English speakers. Data from the LINDSEI and LOCNEC corpora, comprising 259 files from diverse L1 and L2 groups, were analyzed. Results revealed significant differences in fluency, prosodic patterns, and discourse functions. Dimension 1 (D1) showed L1 speakers produced more fluent, informational speech, while L2 groups exhibited simplified, less fluent discourse, highlighting the need to incorporate informational language choices into spoken discourse instruction. Gender also influenced D1 scores: male speakers spoke faster and used fewer high-ending tunes. Findings emphasize distinctions across gender and linguistic groups, advocating for advanced methods that integrate linguistic and social variables to enhance language proficiency assessment and teaching.

This chapter discusses corpus linguistic work that investigates change in grammatical phenomena, such as word order patterns, complementation, clause linkage, pronoun systems, or markers of tense, aspect, and modality. The focus is on English grammar, but the main points are applicable to grammatical change in other languages as well. The chapter has two parts. The first part is a selective overview of diachronic studies with different subject matters and theoretical backgrounds in the area of corpus-based work on grammatical change. The overview addresses four core questions:• What grammatical phenomena have been studied?• What corpus-based measures and methods have been used in the process?• Which types of grammatical change are highly amenable to corpus analysis, and which ones less so?• What empirical and theoretical results have emerged?The second part of the chapter offers a detailed report on a diachronic corpus study addressing the English derivational suffix -ment. The study illustrates how corpus-based analysis can reveal the life cycle of a word-formation process. Discussion of the new formations that are typical for different historical stages yields a new perspective on productivity not as a one-dimensional quantitative measure but as a grammatical characteristic shaped over time by structure, meaning, and frequency alike.

Light-verb constructions (LVCs) in English, that is, combinations such as HAVE a chat or TAKE a walk, have been discussed from various angles. Historically, LVCs are a rather young lexico-grammatical structure catalysed by the increasing prominence of conversion as a word formation process. Functionally, LVCs are associated with informal, colloquial contexts of language use. Further, LVCs occur with varying frequencies across different varieties of English. Yet, reliable multifactorial explorations of LVCs – particularly in contrast to simplex verbs as their structural alternants – are still rare. The present study examines LVCs in Sri Lankan English (SLE), a localised second-language variety in South Asia. The analysis reveals that the phonological principles of rhythm and segment alternation, which have so far not been explored in the choice between LVCs and simplex verbs, are of central importance. SLE speakers prefer LVCs when they adhere more consistently to rules of rhythm and segment alternation than the alternative simplex verbs. Also sociobiographic factors – particularly ethnicity and the language spoken at home – matter for the alternation in the Sri Lankan context.

This chapter starts out from the serendipitous observation of patterns where look forward to is complemented not by a verbal -ing form (as would be expected by standard grammars) but by a plain infinitive, as in I’m looking forward to meet you. It investigates the spread and frequency of this construction in a wide range of corpora, some of which also allow a diachronic comparison, and considers several potentially conditioning factors. Grammatically, this pattern can be explained as a case of reanalysis in the process of structural transmission, showcasing structural simplification that may characterise second-language acquisition. The form to, the final element in the phrasal-prepositional verb under discussion, is reinterpreted as a homonymic but functionally different form, the to infinitive marker. The results clearly support the hypothesis that the ’look forward to + plain infinitive’ pattern constitutes more than mere performance errors and appears to represent an ’embryonic’ manifestation of an incipient change, with a strong focus in Asian Englishes, and possibly with Indian English as an epicentre, although the trend may have been reversed recently in formal registers.