The Australian National Corpus (and beyond)

The Australian National Corpus is not a traditional corpus in the sense of a single structured dataset of language use, but rather is a gateway to a range of different spoken and written corpora representing aspects of English language usage in Australia that is accessible through an online portal (www.ausnc.org.au). In this chapter, we first outline the rationale for developing a large repository of language data of this sort and briefly describe how it was developed. We then provide an overview of the structure and content of the Australian National Corpus (AusNC), including how users can access this resource, and the advantages and disadvantages of the current model. We next briefly summarise how the AusNC has been used in both research and teaching to date, before going on to suggest that the combinatorial approach to interrogating corpora to which the AusNC lends itself has important implications for how we undertake research about different varieties of English more generally. We conclude with a brief discussion of potential future directions.