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Current trends in Corpus Linguistics and textual variation

Corpus Linguistics has proved of great value as a methodological tool in shedding light on how discourse is constructed in different text types. This opening contribution to the special issue “Corpus-linguistic perspectives on textual variation” provides an account of some of the most common applications of Corpus Linguistics, describes some of the most widely used corpora, and pins down some of the most influential corpus-based research works. In so doing, we contextualise the contributions to this collection of articles. The main aim of this special issue is to showcase cutting-edge research on textual variation based on linguistic corpora, thus illustrating how Corpus Linguistics draws from but also feeds a multiplicity of linguistic branches, such as (Critical) Discourse Analysis, Register Studies, Historical Linguistics, and Dialectology.