Abstract
Corpus Linguistics has made great strides in language research and teaching but it is only fairly known, and thus its potentials lost, to many African academics and linguistic communities. The aim of this chapter is to introduce corpus linguistics to those African researchers and others who are not yet familiar with, or have limited knowledge of, the field and who are interested in using this method for linguistic analysis. The chapter introduces the concept of corpus linguistics ( Section 1 ), explains some of the key terms and concepts used in it ( Section 2 ), and considers the types of corpora, as well as the scope and applications of corpus linguistics ( Section 3 ).