This chapter describes the process of analyzing a corpus. It discusses the general notions of quantitative and qualitative research methodologies within the context of various types of corpus analyses, including Biber’s work on multi-dimensional analysis as well as a more qualitative analysis of Donald Trump’s style of speaking termed Trump Speak. These analyses are used to illustrate the various stages of doing research in general, and corpus-based research specifically. For instance, the analysis of Trump Speak is linked to a discussion of “how to frame a research question"; “how to select relevant corpora that can be analyzed to pursue the research question"; “how to ‘extract’ grammatical and lexical information from a corpus,” using such tools as concordancing programs; and, finally, how to “integrate relevant linguistic theories into the analysis of corpus results,” so that the research does more than simply list, for instance, frequency counts. There is also a discussion of “mixed methods”: how to introduce quantitative and qualitative research methods into a corpus analysis, followed by an example corpus analysis employing descriptive statistics such as the chi square statistic, and additionally, a description of multi-dimensional analysis in the work of Douglas Biber.

This is a ‘quantitative methods’ chapter. It describes the basic quantitative concepts in corpus linguistics. These are: frequency and normalised frequency; range and dispersion; the concept of keyness; collocation; and lexical bundles. In each case research using these ideas is discussed and issues around the different available measures are presented. The chapter then introduces multidimensional analysis and how quantitative studies might be enhanced by semantic and other annotation. The emphasis in the chapter is on how the various measures are used and the impact they have on the applications of corpus research.