Reviewed by

What counts as evidence in linguistics? In our discipline this is a perennial issue, a question to which different schools and generations of linguists have given varying responses. Inductive procedures, the analysis of language samples known as corpora, have been one strong option since Bloomfield's structuralism and have gained increasing momentum in recent years. Technological advances have resulted in the emergence of what many perceive as a new subdiscipline, " Corpus Linguistics, " focusing upon the analysis of large computerized text corpora. 1 Although this branch of linguistics is also known, practiced, and growing in the United States (where it started out with Kuc 6 era and Francis's " Brown Corpus " in the 1960s), its primary centers of scientific activity lie in Europe and elsewhere, with a scientific organization called the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME) housed in Norway, 2 a scholarly journal (ICAME Journal), and an annual series of conferences. Over the last decade one of the current topics at these conferences has been the project presented in the volume under review. This project has arguably resulted from a merger of Corpus Linguistics with the growing interest in varieties of English worldwide and their structural peculiarities. The International Corpus of English (ICE) project was initiated in 1988 by the late Sidney Greenbaum, the editor of this volume, who has been succeeded in his role as project coordinator by Charles Meyer of the University of Massachusetts. ICE is actually a conjunction of 18 regional projects, each of which aims at compiling an electronic corpus of about one million words of spoken and written English. The individual subcorpora cover countries where English is " a majority first language " (3),