The Web as Corpus: Theory and Practice. Maristella Gatto. London/New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. xxii + 232 pp. ISBN 978-14-411-6112-3. $42.95 (paperback).

Reviewed by Liangping Wu

National Research Centre for Foreign Language Education,

Beijing Foreign Studies University, China, and School of

International Studies, Hunan University of Commerce, China

The Web as Corpus: Theory and Practice is a timely and thorough introduction to the promising field of ‘Web as Corpus’ (hereafter WaC) at a time when exponentially cumulating online language use has, to a great extent, become the default mode of personal and professional communication. The increasing production of huge amounts of linguistic data on the Web has also become powerful resources in linguistic and social research. It is without exaggeration to say that WaC is coming of age. Although several dedicated monographs have been published on this subject, the book stands out by putting both theoretical considerations and technical and analytical aspects at the center in the account of using the Web as corpus. In the book, the Web is understood as ‘a corpus surrogate’, ‘a corpus shop’, and ‘the ........

Appeared in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (SSCI-indexed, formerly Literary and Linguistic Computing), 2015

http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/06/21/llc.fqv020