Abstract: What is corpus linguistics? It is certainly quite distinct from most other topics you might study in linguistics, as it is not directly about the study of any particular aspect of language. Rather, it is an area which focuses upon a set of procedures, or methods, for studying language (although, as we will see, at least one major school of corpus linguists does not agree with the characterisation of corpus linguistics as a methodology). The procedures themselves are still developing, and remain an unclearly delineated set – though some of them, such as concordancing, are well established and are viewed as central to the approach. Given these procedures, we can take a corpus-based approach to many areas of linguistics. Yet precisely because of this, as this book will show, corpus linguistics has the potential to reorient our entire approach to the study of language. It may refine and redefine a range of theories of language. It may also enable us to use theories of language which were at best difficult to explore prior to the development of corpora of suitable size and machines of sufficient power to exploit them. Importantly, the development of corpus linguistics has also spawned, or at least facilitated the exploration of, new theories of language – theories which draw their inspiration from attested language use and the findings drawn from it. In this book, these impacts of corpus linguistics will be introduced, explored and evaluated.
Publication Year: 2011
Publication Date: 2011-10-06
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 15
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