This volume contains a selection of the papers delivered at the Corpus Linguistics 2003 conference, held at Lancaster University in April 2003. The papers selected address a wide range of world languages - Basque, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Maltese, Russian, Spanish, and Slovene. Both synchronic and diachronic studies are included, as well as studies of learner language. In addition to mainstream linguistic analyses of phonetics, vocabulary, syntax, semantics, and rhetoric, application areas covered in the volume include financial forecasting, cross-cultural research, corpus processing, and language teaching. Contents Andrew WILSON, Dawn ARCHER and Paul RAYSON: Preface I. ADURIZ, M.J. ARANZABE, J.M. ARRIOLA, A. ATUTXA, A. DÍAZ DE ILARRAZA, N. EZEIZA, K. GOJENOLA, M. ORONOZ, A. SOROA, R. URIZAR: Methodology and steps towards the construction of EPEC, a corpus of written Basque tagged at morphological and syntactic levels for automatic processing Khurshid AHMAD, David CHENG, Tugba TASKAYA, Saif AHMAD, Lee GILLAM, Pensiri MANOMAISUPAT, Hayssam TRABOULSI and Andrew HIPPISLEY: The mood of the (financial) markets: in a corpus of words and of pictures Jørg ASMUSSEN: Towards a methodology for corpus-based studies of linguistic change: Contrastive observations and their possible diachronic interpretations in the Korpus 2000 and Korpus 90 General Corpora of Danish Kate BEECHING: Synchronic and diachronic variation: the how and why of the sociolinguistic corpora Roderick BOVINGDON and Angelo DALLI: Statistical analysis of the source origin of Maltese Julie CARSON-BERNDSEN, Ulrike GUT and Robert KELLY: Discovering regularities in non-native speech Vojko GORJANC: Tracking lexical changes in the reference corpus of Slovene texts José María GUIRAO, Antonio MORENO SANDOVAL, Ana GONZÁLEZ LEDESMA, Guillermo DE LA MADRID, Manuel ALCÁNTARA: Relating linguistic units to socio-contextual information in a spontaneous speech corpus of Spanish Randall L. JONES: An analysis of lexical text coverage in contemporary German Sarah LEE and Debra ZIEGELER: Analysing a semantic corpus study across English dialects: Searching for paradigmatic parallels Agnieszka LEŃKO-SZYMAŃSKA: The curse and the blessing of mobile phones – a corpus-based study into American and Polish rhetorical conventions Judy NOGUCHI, Thomas ORR and Yukio TONO: Using a dedicated corpus to identify features of professional English usage: What do “we” do in science journal articles? Serge SHAROFF: Methods and tools for development of the Russian Reference Corpus Dirk SPEELMAN, Stefan GRONDELAERS and Dirk GEERAERTS: A profile-based calculation of region and register variation: the synchronic and diachronic status of the two main national varieties of Dutch Stella E. O. TAGNIN: A multilingual learner corpus in Brazil Andrew WILSON and Olga MOUDRAIA : Quantitative or qualitative content analysis? Experiences from a cross-cultural comparison of female students’ attitudes to shoe fashions in Germany, Poland and Russia Yang XIAO-JUN: Survey and Prospect of China’s Corpus-Based Research