Tony McEnery is Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University and Changjiang Chair, Xi'an Jiaotong University. He has worked since the late 1980s on studying language using corpus data. He has published widely on a range of languages, topics and methods, with notable publications including Corpus Linguistics: Method, Theory and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2011, with Hardie).

Preface; Introduction; 1. The first sketch; 2. What is science?; 3. How to do science?; 4. What is social science and the digital humanities?; 5. Everyday linguistics: form and function; 6. Repetition and replication: laying the groundwork for an empirical study; 7. Replication: carrying out an empirical study; 8. Conclusion; Appendix 1; Appendix 2.

"How might evidence of language use - writing and speech - be used as a way of studying language? Corpus linguistics is the study of linguistic data from a particular language or set of languages. It is a fast-moving approach to studying language, and there is still a degree of divergence in how research questions are approached using corpus data. This book uses a framework, based on the work of Karl Popper, to explore a number of fundamental issues in corpus linguistics. It critically evaluates how these issues are tackled, and proposes a set of best practices for future research. It spells out why using corpus data is valuable, what we can learn from using it, and how we may most effectively progress our understanding of language by using such data. It is essential reading for researchers and students of language in general, and of applied linguistics and English language in particular"--