Corpus Linguistics and the creation of corpora center on the creation of a collection of naturally occurring authentic texts that can be electronically stored and their language patterns studied through the use of corpus software. Corpus Linguistics has seen rapid growth in the last two decades especially with the use of learner and multilingual corpora covering both European and non-European languages. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistically Annotated Corpora by Sandra Kubler and Heike Zinsmeister aims to introduce a range of corpus tools and the uses of annotated corpora to traditional linguistics and linguistics students who are not familiar with corpora or the linguistic value they offer. The concept of annotating a corpus involves ‘tagging’ the corpus’ texts to highlight word classes and semantically and syntactically relevant words or longer phrases known as language ‘chunks’.

The 320 page book is supplemented by a companion webpage that lists annotated corpora and existing query tools, a further reading list and an exercise section at the end of each chapter. These additions allow readers to build on their initial reading in this book and also practice using the tools the book promotes. In a similar manner, the appendices provide the basic annotation schemes of two well-known corpora: the Penn Treebank corpus and the International Corpus of English (ICE) while the bibliography provides readers with a reference dense reading and resource list of both historic and modern articles, books and tools.