CORPUS STUDIES, CURRENT TRENDS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Abstract

Corpus linguistics has emerged as one of the most dynamic fields in English language studies, offering empirical insights into patterns of vocabulary, grammar, discourse, and variation across diverse contexts. Over the past three decades, the scope of corpus studies has expanded remarkably, moving beyond early text collections such as the Brown Corpus to vast learner corpora, multimodal resources, and real-time social media datasets. This review article examines the current trends shaping corpus research and highlights promising future directions. Current scholarship demonstrates an increasing interest in world Englishes, learner corpora, and corpus-assisted discourse analysis, particularly in political and media communication. At the same time, new applications in pedagogy, translation, and forensic linguistics illustrate the methodological versatility of corpus approaches. Advances in computational tools and natural language processing have further broadened possibilities for large-scale, automated analysis of language data. However, challenges remain concerning representativeness, ethical issues in digital corpora, and the balance between quantitative and qualitative methods. Looking ahead, corpus studies are expected to place greater emphasis on under-represented English varieties, including South Asian and African Englishes, as well as on the integration of multimodal data and artificial intelligence techniques. This review argues that corpus linguistics is not only consolidating its role as a central methodology in applied linguistics but also redefining how scholars conceptualize language use in global, digital, and multilingual contexts.