Reviewed by Sandra Becker, São Carlos, SP, Brazil

Empirical linguistics the center of Text, discourse and corpora: Theory and analysis. It is discussed on a new level because the interpretation and data analysis were carried out using cutting edge protocols. Books as brave, instructive, and graceful as this do not spring from idle natures. The papers gathered here are from an event that took place at The Tuscan Word Centre, at the University of Saarbrücken in 2004, when attention was turned to corpus linguistics on Teachers’ Day. It is clear that the provocative and stimulating talks given and the participants’ contributions greatly influenced this eloquent and enriching volume.

This book presents eight well-organized and compellingly written chapters that mingle case studies with valuable accounts of language theory and research. Each author contributed two articles, and John Sinclair provides a brilliant introduction.

To demonstrate how literary creativity may be handled and described through a corpus-based theory, Michael Hoey examines fragments of three literary texts in Ch. 1. He explains that we are primed to recognize and replicate a number of language phenomena. Before exploring literary language, H highlights the uniqueness of lexical priming, demonstrating how priming cannot be directly inferred from the corpus evidence. He also suggests that every genre, style, domain, and social situation in which a word occurs is part of the priming process. H’s second contribution uses concrete evidence to investigate the relationship between lexis and grammar. H considers grammar to be a product of priming and cites the numeral system as well as data from books written for very young children as evidence.

Ch. 3 addresses the social dimensions of discourse. After analyzing discourse as Michel Foucault understands it—and showing how controversial it can be—Wolfgang Teubert discusses his own view of discourse, which allows the researcher to define the parameters that build the singularity and complexity of discourse analysis. T then turns his attention to hermeneutics and its impact on what he calls parole-linguistics. In his second contribution, Ch. 4, T presents a case study that illustrates a work grounded in parole-linguistics. Because diachronic corpus linguistics is less interested in regularities—and has its focus turned to the socially constructed change that discourse objects undergo—T analyzes the meaning of work and property within Catholic social encyclicals from a social constructivist perspective, based on the hermeneutical approach described in Ch. 3.

Ch. 5 returns to the classroom, as Michael Stubbs discusses his views on Ferdinand De Saussure, René Decartes, David Hume, Leonard Bloomfield, Eugene Halliday, John Searle, and Karl Popper’s distinct ways of understanding language. This section is remarkably instructive. S explores the rationalist deductive and the empiricist inductive views of language and describes how corpus studies may benefit from the use of concordance tools. In Ch. 6, S illustrates how quantitative data can help to identify phrasal constructions in the language system.

Michaela Mahlberg offers a resonant account of the relationship between lexis and text in Ch. 7. She explores how meanings can be analyzed through concordance lines and textual features. By focusing on corpus stylistics in Ch. 8, M succeeds in showing a complex network of clusters in literary texts. These clusters are mapped, and their functions are explored.

This compelling book leaves no stone unturned in addressing a variety of methods for the empirical observation of data. Students, academics, and researchers will benefit greatly by reading this work about the field of empirical linguistics.