摘要：Along with the advances of information and communication technologies (ICT), the means available to linguists and text researchers have grown exponentially. To begin with, the advent of digitalized text production, text editing, and text storage tools fostered the creation of very large collections of texts, also known as electronic corpora. In fact, in recent years, various digitalized collections of textual material and various computer programs specifically designed for their analysis – corpus tools – have been extensively used for various types of textual investigations and in a wide array of applied language studies. Small-sized to mega-sized digitalized collections of texts and corpus-analysis tools are used nowadays to support research in such fields as general linguistics, lexicography, grammar studies, terminology, translation studies, or literary studies. Corpus linguistics, the discipline that deals with corpora and corpus tools, has developed exponentially in the Western world, to the point that most language-related studies are nowadays based on its principles and tenets. Yet, because the development of corpus-analysis tools specifically designed to support the peculiarities of Romanian as a language would require insight from interdisciplinary teams of researchers, i.e. at least from the fields of linguistics and natural language processing, corpus linguistics is still a tentative branch of research in Romania. Using a corpus of 140 English ICT news articles and press releases, this article aims to discuss some of the basic concepts and principles used nowadays in corpus linguistics as well as to provide a practical demonstration of how the main types of corpus-analysis tools may be used to investigate a collection of texts. 1. Word-lists and keyword tools Creating word-lists is the most basic way of analysing a corpus. Unlike humans, computer programs are able to break up a text into all of its components (words) and then re-organise these elements according to various criteria in a matter of seconds. While calling it "a transformation", Scott and Tribble emphasise that the process of creating word-lists "changes the object being considered radically from a
