Book excerpt: A lively hands-on introduction to the use ofelectronic corpora in the description and analysis of English, this bookprovides an ideal introduction for university students of English at theintermediate level. Students planning papers, dissertations or theses willfind the book a particularly valuable guide.After introducing corpora andthe rationale and basic methodology of corpus linguistics, the authorpresents a number of case studies providing new insights into vocabulary,collocations, phraseology, metaphor and metonymy, syntactic structures, maleand female language, and language change. In a final chapter it is shown howthe web can be used as a source for linguistic investigations. Each chapterhas study questions, exercises and suggestions for further reading.Studentswill benefit from the book's*Clear language and structure *Well-definedterminology *Step-by-step instructions *Generous, up-to-date exemplificationfrom different varieties of English around the world *Accompanying web-pagewith exercises and updated information about freely accessiblecorpora.