This book provides detailed studies in one of the fastest growing areas of linguistics - corpus analysis - and shows how computers can be used to reveal culturally significant patterns of language use. It contains copious authentic examples for millions of words of corpus data and from many types of naturally occurring texts: school books, courtroom language, speeches by politicians and other public figures, sexist language. Lexical collocations, modality, transitivity, causativity and agency are analyzed to provide many clear examples of how such patterns convey attitudes, presuppositions and points of view. A major chapter demonstrates methods of analyzing key words in British culture. Stubbs gives his work a systematic theoretical basis in an authoritative explanation of the principles of British text analysis from the 1930s to the 1990s, especially in work by J. R. Firth, M. A. K. Halliday and J. McH. Sinclair. This tradition of social linguistics shows how important it is to base linguistic descriptions on adequate attested data.
The book is designed to introduce students to basic methods of corpus analysis, semantics and pragmatics, language and ideology, critical linguistics and stylistics. Some knowledge of introductory linguistics is assumed: the book is suitable from second year courses upwards. The main audience will be undergraduate and postgraduate students in courses on corpus linguistics, text and discourse analysis, semantics and pragmatics, language and ideology, critical linguistics, and stylistics.