Welcome to the first issue of the Journal of Corpora and Discourse

The rationale behind the launch of the online open-access Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies (JCaDS) is partly to meet the need for a discourse journal dedicated to research in which corpora play a significant role and partly to create a new corpus linguistics journal with a particular focus on discourse. Discourse is here defined as language in use as a vehicle of communication, as language doing things, as speakers and writers attempting to influence the beliefs and actions of their interlocutors using language. But the rationale was also the realization that corpus-based, corpus-driven, corpusassisted discourse analysis, corpus approaches to discourse, however we wish to name it, definable as ‘that set of studies into the form and/or function of language as communicative discourse which incorporate the use of corpora’ (Partington, Duguid and Taylor, 2013, p. 10), has for some considerable time matured into a field of study in its own right. It already has for instance, a biannual conference, and several volumes with ‘corpora’ and ‘discourse’ in their titles are on library bookshelves. As editors, then, we felt the time had come to provide a journal home, an on-line shop-window for the produce of this field of study.