Some thoughts on the problem of rtepresenting ESP through small corpora

Studies on representativeness have shown that the size and teh content of a corpus are strictly interdependent factors and that while a small corpus cannot guarantee adequate representation of general language, it is equally true that "specialist" language, charcaterizing a register or a genre, may not be adequately represented in large corpora. However, while issues related to the representativeness of large corpora have been widely discussed in the literature, no such discussion has been carried out for small corpora and these have implicitly been considered as "non-representative". In this paper I pose the problem of small corpus representativeness and of criteria used particularly in the design of small corpora of specialist language used in ESP teaching and learning environments.