Corpus linguistics is a study of language and a method of linguistic analysis which uses a collection of natural or “real word” texts known as corpus. Corpus linguistics is used to analyze and research a number of linguistic questions and offers a unique insight into the dynamic of language which has made it one of the most widely used linguistic methodologies. Since corpus linguistics involves the use of large corpora that consist of millions or sometimes even billion words, it relies heavily on the use of computers to determine what rules govern the language and what patters (grammatical or lexical for instance) occur. Thus it is not surprising that corpus linguistics emerged in its modern form only after the computer revolution in the 1980s. The Brown Corpus, the first modern and electronically readable corpus, however, was created by Henry Kucera and W. Nelson Francis as early as the 1960s.
