The study of language as expressed in samples (corpora) of real-world text is called

• A. Corpus
• B. Corpus Linguistics
• C. Corrective Feedback
• D. Cross-Linguistic Influence

Answer: (B)

Studying language through real-world text samples is the domain of corpus linguistics. A corpus is simply a large, structured collection of texts. Corpus linguistics uses these corpora to observe how language is actually used, measuring frequency, discovering patterns of word pairs (collocations), grammatical choices in context, and variation across genres. The term corpus by itself is just the data resource, not the study itself. Corrective feedback refers to guidance given to language learners on errors, while cross-linguistic influence deals with how languages affect each other in multilingual speakers. So the best fit for the description is corpus linguistics.