Sticking to the text: a corpus linguist's view of language

Corpus Linguistics is the study of large, computer‐held bodies of text, or ‘corpora’. In the last five years, this approach to language study has become increasingly popular among linguists, and developments in computing technology and software and in storage mechanisms like CD are making it possible even for the individual PC user. The aim of the linguist is to describe the language, and corpus linguistics reflects the shift in academic focus from the brain to the text as the appropriate source of information. A description derived by introspection will tend to be idiosyncratic and partial, since no individual has total awareness of how they or others use language. A description based on the observation of appropriate corpus data, on the other hand, can provide a broader view of language use, including statements about the relative typicality of individual features based on their frequency of occurrence in the corpus.