The pedagogical and linguistic research implications of the GC to on-line parallel and comparable corpora

Monolingual corpora were first thought of as an excellent basis for lexicographical research but, as time went on, research projects extended to various kinds of analysis, from the lexicon, to syntactic patterns to various aspects of text structure. Nowadays the study of the general lexicon covers the analysis of single and multi-word units in context, collocations, lexical groups, lexical 'bundles' (Biber, 2003), and 'priming' (Hoey, 2003). There is also a lot of interest in studying specialized lexicons, observing terminology in context, and the (semi-) automatic extraction of terminology. The pedagogical uses of monolingual corpora tend to be reserved for more sophisticated language study and, despite efforts to promote the use of corpora as an alternative or supplement to the dictionary as a language resource, it is fair to say that use of corpora by the general reading public is still in the future (Maia & Sarmento), 2003).