Review: Jesse Egbert, Douglas Biber and Bethany Gray. Designing and evaluating language corpora: A practical framework for corpus representativeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 300 pp. ISBN 978-1316605882

Corpus linguistics, as a tool for research, is increasingly prevalent nowadays. It is relied on by researchers from diverse linguistics sub-disciplines, ranging from discourse analysis and sociolinguistics to computational linguistics, to name just a few. Designing and evaluating corpora that will be fit for the purpose they are being adopted for is imperative. This is particularly true since the need for robust and representative language corpora is well known. The authors of the book under review here, Jesse Egbert, Douglas Biber and Bethany Gray, have made significant contributions to the field of corpus linguistics, building on their research to advance the understanding and practice of corpus design and evaluation with a particular emphasis on representativeness, which dates back to Biber’s work on corpus design in the 1990s (p. xii), honed over the years by means of their own extensive reading and research. In their introduction (p. 3) to Designing and evaluating language corpora: A practical framework for corpus representativeness, Egbert, Biber and Gray underline the fact that in definitions of the term ‘corpus’, ‘representative’ is, indeed, one of the most frequent key concepts. This review explores their framework.