Guy Aston & Lou Burnard 
BNC Handbook [PDF ebook] 
Exploring the British National Corpus with SARA

The increasing accessibility and convenience of large databanks (or ‘corpora’) of natural language, and the belief that theory must be based on language as it is, have placed empirical linguistics once again at the forefront of linguistics. This series provides accessible introductions for students coming to empirical linguistics for the first time. Books selected for the series are clearly written introductions which encourage the practical use of empirical data through specially designed individual and class exercises.