I am a professor of linguistics, and was assigned to teach a general Corpus Linguistics course for the first time. This book was billed as a standard first textbook in the subject, suitable for uninitiated linguistics students. We have found that the book is chiefly an annotated bibliography of the field, and does not cover enough topics in sufficient depth to serve as a course textbook. I have had to supplement nearly every portion of the course with either additional readings or methodology that I provide on my own. The students find it dreadfully dry, it reads almost like a phone book, jumping lightly from one barely-treated topic to another without ever actually teaching a single thing.



Unfortunately, the publisher refused my efforts to contact them to get myself an advance copy. Now I know why this happened---by letting me see the book in advance, they would likely have lost a bunch of sales.