Members of staff in the Centre are involved a wide range of corpus research projects. The University was home to one of the major pioneering corpus projects, the COBUILD project (developed in collaboration with the publisher Collins) and students and staff in the Centre work with the Bank of English corpus. Rosamund Moon was a member of the project team and she continues to use the Bank of English for her lexicographical work.
Paul Thompson worked on the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) and British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus development projects and he is currently looking at different aspects of academic discourse using these two corpora.
Susan Hunston has developed a corpus-driven approach to a lexical grammar of English and also has explored corpus approaches to the study of evaluation.
Other research in the Centre includes corpus stylistics, corpus-based studies of phraseology and metaphor, and the use of corpus methodologies in critical discourse analysis.