Designing and Evaluating Language Corpora

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.

• 1. Introduction; 2. Approaches to representativeness in previous corpus linguistic research; 3. Corpus representativeness: a conceptual and methodological framework; 4. Domain considerations; 5. Distribution considerations; 6. The influence of domain and distribution considerations on corpus representativeness – bringing it all together; 7. Corpus design and representativeness in practice; Glossary; Appendix A. Example articles documenting existing corpora; Appendix B. Survey of corpus design and compilation practices.

'A valuable guide for corpora users and designers, a must-read before beginning the process of corpora selection and design.' Ana Abigahil Flores Hernández and Pauline Moore, Tertium Linguistic Journal