New in paperback. Hardcover was published in 2013. This book discusses some of the pioneering challenges faced in designing, building and utilising insights from the analysis of spoken corpora, arguing that, even though writing is heavily privileged in corpus research, the spoken language can reveal patterns of language use that are both different and distinctive and that this has important implications for the way in which language is described, for the study of human communication and for the field of applied linguistics as a whole.