A WaCky Introduction

We use the Web today for a myriad purposes, from buying a plane ticket to browsing an ancient manuscript, from looking up a recipe to watching a TV program. And more. Besides these “proper” uses, there are also less obvious, more indirect ways of exploiting the potential of the Web. For language researchers, the Web is also an enormous collection of (mainly) textual materials which make it possible, for the first time ever, to study innumerable instances of language performance, produced by different individuals in a variety of settings for a host of purposes. One of the tenets of corpus linguistics is the requirement to observe language as it is produced in authentic settings, for authentic purposes, by speakers and writers whose aim is not to display their language competence, but rather to achieve some objective through language. To study “purposeful language behavior”, corpus linguists require collections of authentic texts (spoken and/or written). It is therefore not surprising that many (corpus) linguists have recently turned to the World Wide Web as the richest and most easily accessible source of language material available. At the same time, for language technologists, who have been arguing for long that “more data is better data”, the WWW is a virtually unlimited source of “more data”. The potential uses to which the Web has been (or can be) put within the field of language studies are numerous and varied, from checking word frequencies using Google counts to constructing general or specialized corpora