Contents -- Introduction -- 1. Overviewing 25 years of corpus linguistic studies -- Corpus linguistics 25+ years on -- Corpus development 25 years on: from super-corpus to cyber-corpus -- Seeing through multilingual corpora -- Corpora and spoken discourse -- 2. Descriptive studies in English syntax and semantics -- An example of frequent English phraseology: distributions, structures and functions -- The semantic properties of going to: distribution patterns infour subcorpora of the British National Corpus -- The superlative in spoken English -- Semantically-based queries with a joint BNC/WordNet database -- Size matters - or thus can meaningful structures be revealed in large corpora -- Inversion in modern written English: syntactic complexity, information status and the creative writer -- The filling in the sandwich: internal modification of idioms -- NP-internal functions and extended uses of the 'type' nouns kind, sort, and type: towards a comprehensive, corpus-based description -- 3. Second Language Acquisition, parallel corpora and specialist corpora -- Student writing of research articles in a foreign language: metacognition and corpora -- The structure of corpora in SLA research -- The path from learner corpus analysis to language pedagogy: some neglected issues -- Exploiting the Corpus of East-African English -- Transitive verb plus reflexive pronoun/personal pronoun patterns in English and Japanese: using a Japanese-English parallel corpus -- The retrieval of false anglicisms in newspaper texts -- Lexical semantics for software requirements engineering - a corpus-based approach.