Using the Web as Corpus for Linguistic Research

In the last decade the working methods in Computational Linguistics have changed drastically. Fifteen years back, most research focused on selected example sentences. Nowadays the access to and exploitation of large text corpora is commonplace. This shift is reflected in a renaissance of work in Corpus Linguistics and documented in a number of pertinent books in recent years, e.g. the introductions by (Biber et al. 1998) and (Kennedy 1998) and the more methodologically oriented works on statistics and programming in Corpus Linguistics by (Oakes 1998) and (Mason 2000).