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 chang