Abstract
This lecture provides a general introduction to corpus research in language acquisition. Corpus methods allow reliable data collection and replicable data analysis. We will start with an overview of corpus use in the history of first language acquisition research. We will introduce the Bilingual Child and Child-directed Russian Speech (BiRCh) Corpus. We then move to the methodology for using existing corpora (with the BiRCh and Russian National Corpus (НКРЯ) as examples) to study various aspects of language use and acquisition: using plain-text corpora to study lexical properties of speech (fillers); using part-of-speech and morphologically annotated corpora to investigate Russian polite requests (Mozhno pozhalujsta with and without verbs). I will then provide a brief introduction to corpus construction to study language varieties for which no pre-existing corpora (or no suitable ones) are available.