[Corpora-List] Bootcamp: 'Quantitative Corpus Linguistics with R'--re Louw's endorsement

[Chris Lists]

Recent postings on this thread raise some important issues with respect to
the corpus linguistics and its relationship with linguistic theory, the area
with which the journal that Stefan co-edits is concerned. My own view is
that corpus linguistics is essentially a methodology, but one which has
provided (and continues to provide) many fascinating insights into how
people actually use language, which often call into question cherished
notions which grammarians of most persuasions have relied on (I am thinking,
for example, of the fact that the 'units of meaning' postulated by Sinclair
and others often cut across traditional constituency boundaries). The
challenge for theoretical linguists is then to account, within their own
theories, for the phenomena revealed by corpus methodologies, both
qualitative and quantitative. My own work has been concerned in part with
how functionalist theories might try to achieve this aim (two articles in
Functions of Language [vols 10(2), 2003 and 11(2), 2004] are particularly
relevant here, together with an article which is about to be published in
the Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses). In this area, as in others,
linguists who would describe themselves primarily as functionalists, and
proponents of the cognitively-oriented approaches which Stefan favours, have
much to learn from one another. Fortunately, there is currently some
interesting dialogue between the two camps, and an increasing degree of
overlap between more clearly functionalist and more clearly cognitivist
and/or constructionist areas of what my colleague Paco Gonzálvez García and
I (Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 4, 2006) have dubbed
'functional-cognitive space'. In these very welcome rapprochements, a
crucial issue will (or should!) be the role of corpus data in the
formulation of theoretical claims. Vive l'intégration!

Chris Butler
Honorary Professor, Swansea University, UK.


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