"This invaluable book places words and their phraseology at the centre of an account of language that covers meaning, discourse, culture, and much more. The author successfully demystifies his own discovery processes, providing the reader with tools for further investigation. The book's clarity and depth make it indispensable for students and researchers alike." Susan Hunston, University of Birmingham "Stubbs does a great job of demonstrating the use of corpus techniques for the analysis of lexical semantics. He shows that it is indeed possible to analyse meaning by looking at corpus data, and that the way meaning is constructed through repeated patterns of usage can only be investigated by doing so. His style is very explicit, and his prose is easily readable. I well definitely be using this book in my seminars next term." Oliver Mason, Literary and Linguistic Computing