In their research, Jiménez and Breeze deployed corpus linguistics to bring to light the similarities and differences between the way the Spanish financial crisis has been covered by the media in Spain and the United Kingdom. Their study sought to identify the ideological assumptions that underlie media representations of such events, seen through the lens of critical discourse analysis. Corpus linguistics was presented as being particularly suited to this approach, because it allowed the researchers to pinpoint lexical and grammatical patterns that emerged from large volumes of text. Besides highlighting similarities and differences across various media sources, the authors rounded off the presentation by providing a qualitative account of patterns that could not be uncovered through individual analysis. 

Organized by the Universidad de Alicante's Interuniversity Institute for Applied Linguistics and the Spanish Association of Corpus Linguistics, the 5th International Conference on Corpus Linguistics explored the growing use of corpus methodology in descriptive studies. The newly emerging resources and applications associated with corpus research pose new challenges to language researchers and professionals.

For this reason, the theme of this year's edition was “Corpus Resources for Descriptive and Applied Studies: Current Challenges and Future Directions”. The conference's programme examined a host of new theoretical issues that are arising from the use of corpus-based analysis today. Also up for discussion were the applications of corpora for terminology, translation and language teaching and acquisition, etc.; the creation and exploitation of corpora in descriptive and applied research; the use of technology for the analysis of texts for different purposes; IT developments for the compilation, exploitation and analysis of corpora; and the relationship between corpus analysis and ICTs.