Author: Laura Aull

Thanks to freeware toolkits like AntConc, and searchable databases like the Corpus of Contemporary American English, or COCA, it is easier than ever to analyze electronically-available texts for linguistic patterns. This practice is called corpus linguistic analysis, and it transforms written language into word frequencies and patterns largely impossible to note in conventional reading. It therefore enables us and our students to be analysts of written language in new ways–even to analyze texts that have never been examined as such. I use corpus linguistics in my work because I am interested in the tacit patterns that characterize academic genres (and…