This course explores the growing field of quantitative empirical linguistic research using electronic text corpora, and offers practical instructions and exercises not only for working with existing English text corpora, but also for collecting and preparing your own material for analysis with corpus-linguistic software tools (such as AntConc or CorpusExplorer).

Topics covered in the more theoretical sessions and in the reading material include:
- What a corpus is
- Which English corpora are available
- Types of corpora, e.g. online and offline, general and specialized, synchronic and diachronic, static and dynamic, etc.
- Defining and working with part-of-speech tagging, key words, collocates, regular expressions, etc.
- (The benefits and limitations of) Using corpus-linguistic tools on works of literature.

Students will be expected to work on their own corpus-linguistic projects and present their first findings in class in the second half of the semester.