Encoding the Past, Decoding the Future

In the first decade of the twenty first century, Corpus Linguistics as a methodology had already proved to be an impeccable one, and is probably the most elaborate way to approach empirical studies on languages. At present this seems to be essential to formulate general theories about most aspects of languages in different stages of their evolution. Corpora and Corpus Linguistics have been present in research for a reasonably long time now. The evolution of the discipline has been assessed by conferences, new publications and all sorts of events related to the field. Therefore, it seems most convenient to offer an outline of the advances made in the past decade as well as to try and make a guess as for what is yet to come. The editors have used their experience to collect a volume that certainly will have something to offer to the scientific community. Their work as compilers of the Coruna Corpus of English Scientific Writing has made them familiar with corpus-compilation and the time-consuming tasks it entails. As users of this and other corpora, they can also appreciate the tools modern technology offers researchers and what the possibilities of exploitation are. In this way, the selection of papers contained in this volume address a wide range of scholars interested in the discipline, both corpus compilers and users.