A lively hands-on introduction to the use of electronic corpora in the description and analysis of English, this book provides an ideal introduction for university students of English at the intermediate level. Students planning papers, dissertations or theses will find the book a particularly valuable guide.After introducing corpora and the rationale and basic methodology of corpus linguistics, the author presents a number of case studies providing new insights into vocabulary, collocations, phraseology, metaphor and metonymy, syntactic structures, male and female language, and language change. In a final chapter it is shown how the web can be used as a source for linguistic investigations. Each chapter has study questions, exercises and suggestions for further reading.Students will benefit from the book's* Clear language and structure* Well-defined terminology* Step-by-step instructions* Generous, up-to-date exemplification from different varieties of English around the world* Accompanying web-page with exercises and updated information about freely accessible corpora.