This chapter illustrates the multiple uses of corpora in linguistics. It focuses on the fields belonging to theoretical linguistics, namely phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, discourse analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics and the study of linguistic evolution from a diachronic viewpoint. Phonetics studies sounds as acoustic units, whereas phonology studies how these sounds
... [Show full abstract] are used to form meaningful units such as words in different languages. In order to study the rules for assembling morphemes into words, as well as the productivity of different morphemes, morphology needs to rely on external data, since frequency data cannot be inferred through introspection. Unlike syntax, lexicon is ideally suited for corpus analysis. Lexical studies using corpora help to determine the most frequent words belonging to the basic lexicon of a language. Pragmatics studies language use in context. Pragmatics has many points of contact with both discourse analysis and sociolinguistics.