Acknowledgements

Most of the chapters of this volume have their origins in the pre-conference workshop of the 42nd ICAME conference held at TU Dortmund University in August 2021. The workshop, organised by Mark Kaunisto, Marco Schilk, and Jukka Tyrkkö, was titled “Corpus pitfalls: dealing with messy data (and other traps for the unwary)”, and it brought together linguists interested in addressing some of the not-always-so-smooth aspects of corpus linguistic study. The convenors and participants acknowledged the pioneering work of corpus linguistic scholars, such as Matti Rissanen and Charles Fillmore, who drew attention to some of the core challenges in corpus design and interpretation. Their earlier work served as an inspiration for a continued watchful treatment of classic and newer corpus data. It was felt important to share the concerns, demonstrate the practical nature of the problems, and contemplate solutions to work around the challenges, a sentiment that culminated in the present volume.

The editors would like to thank the organisers of the ICAME conference, as well as Jukka Tyrkkö for his insights and contributions in the early stages of planning the present volume. A number of people were called upon to act as external peer reviewers for the chapters, and we are grateful for the expert work done by Tine Breban, Katrin Menzel, Dong Nguyen, Arja Nurmi, Alexandr Rosen, Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer, Fabian Vetter, Valentin Werner, and Martin Weisser. The resulting chapters have greatly benefitted from the review process.

We are also indebted to John Benjamins for including the volume as part of the Studies in Corpus Linguistics series. It has been a pleasure to work with the people at Benjamins through various stages of the project. We thank the series editor Ute Römer-Barron and Kees Vaes for their cordiality and support.