Assignment # 5 Mareena Fayyaz M.

Phil P-97

A COMPREHENSIVE NOTE ON CORPUS LINGUISTICS

AS A METHODOLOGY OR A THEORY.
What is corpus linguistics?

Corpus linguistics approaches the study of language in use through corpora (singular:
corpus). A corpus is a large, principled collection of naturally occurring examples of language
stored electronically. In short, corpus linguistics serves to answer two fundamental research
questions:

1. What particular patterns are associated with lexical or grammatical features?

2. How do these patterns differ within varieties and registers?

Many notable scholars, have, of course, contributed to the development of mod-ern-day

corpus linguistics: Leech, Biber, Johansson, Francis, Hunston, Conrad, and McCarthy, to
name just a few. These scholars have made substantial contributions to corpus linguistics,
both past and present. Many corpus linguists, however, consider John Sinclair to be one of, if
not the most, influential scholar of modern-day corpus linguistics. Sinclair detected that a word
in and of itself does not carry meaning, but that meaning is often made through several words
in a sequence (Sinclair, 1991). This is the idea that forms the backbone of corpus linguistics.

Corpus linguistics as a methodology or a theory

Corpus linguistics is a methodology to obtain and analyze the language data either
quantitatively or qualitatively • It can be applied in almost any area of language studies • An
object of a study is authentic, naturally occurring language use • Corpus linguistics is not a
separate branch of linguistics (like e.g. sociolinguistics) or a theory of language

Corpus linguistics is as theory, It is the discourse itself, and not a language-external

taxonomy of linguistic entities, which will have to provide the categories and classifications
that are needed to answer a given research question.This distinction between these two
approaches to the analysis of discourse could hardly be more stark.

For practitioners of corpus-as-method, corpus linguistics can be used in interaction

with an established analytic framework which may, in and of itself, have nothing to do with
corpus linguistics (in this example, CDA). For Teubert, the only appropriate analytic
framework for corpus evidence regarding discourse is the corpus-as-theory framework
An example: Deignan (2005), whose work will be discussed in more detail in the following
chapter, employs corpus data to address certain problems in Conceptual Metaphor Theory, a
branch of cognitive linguistics which explains large classes of metaphorical utterances by
reference to a smaller number of mental processes. Again, this is a theory which originated
wholly independently from corpus linguistics. As part of her analysis, Deignan identifies
patterns of usage which fit within the framework of the theory – but also patterns whose
consistency cannot be fully explained by that theory. In this case, we can see that the
explanatory theory precedes the corpus analysis, but both informs it and is enriched and
refined by it. We will return later to a more detailed consideration of the neo-Firthian
perspective on pre-existing theories in corpus linguistics.
 Assignment # 5 Mareena Fayyaz M.Phil P-97
Contrary, in a corpus-driven approach the commitment of the linguist is to the integrity of the
data as a whole, and descriptions aim to be comprehensive with respect to corpus evidence.
The corpus, therefore, is seen as more than a repository of examples to back pre-existing
theories or a probabilistic extension to an already well-defined system. The theoretical
statements are fully consistent with, and reflect directly, the evidence provided by the corpus .
. . The theory has no independent existence from the evidence and the general
methodological path is clear: observation leads to hypothesis leads to generalization leads to
unification in theoretical statement.