It offers a combined discussion of the main theoretical, methodological and application issues related to corpus work. Thus, starting from the definition of what is a corpus and why reading a corpus calls for a different methodology from reading a text, the underlying assumptions behind corpus work are discussed.

The two main approaches to corpus work are discussed as the “corpus-based” and the “corpus-driven” approach and the theoretical positions underlying them explored in detail. The book adopts and exemplifies the parameters of the corpus-driven approach and posits a new unit of linguistic description defined systematically in the light of corpus evidence. The applications where the corpus-driven approach is exemplified are language teaching and contrastive linguistics. Alternating between practical examples and theoretical evaluation, the reader is led step-by-step to a detailed understanding of the issues involved in corpus work and, at the same time, tempted to explore for himself some of the major applications where a corpus-driven methodology can reveal unprecedented insights into linguistic patterning.

“Readers of this journal (Literary and Linguistic Computing) will appreciate Tognini-Bonelli's examination of both the corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches to the practice of corpus linguistics, her excellent demonstration of how concordances can be further expected in terms of a full commitment to the data, and her exposition of a theory of meaning that is believed to be very much correlated with textual form. The various theoretical assumptions that the volume details pretty much cover the current practice of corpus linguistics and should be borne in mind whenever the computer is used in the analysis of corpus data. Corpus Linguistics at Work is therefore a timely and valuable contribution to the discipline of corpus linguistics.”