A Lingüística de corpus: história, problemas, legitimidade

Abstract

During the nineties, the accessibility of large corpora and the possibility of manipulation of enormous quantities of linguistic data was the origin of a renewal of interest in statistical and probability evidences that served to directly question linguistics about its objectives, methods and foundations. This interest gained increasing importance and became important currently under the name of corpus linguistics, a field of dominant research in language science. In this article we will show that the designation corpus linguistics covers considerably heterogeneous theoretical positions and research, topics. We show how corpus linguistics, originally of british origin, was later endowed with historical and theoretical legitimacy while at the same time intending to establish itself as a new paradigm in language science. Finally we distinguish two attitudes inside the british tradition: one, intending to build the studies on a corpus and in a new paradigm based on a retrospective construction of the critical works of chomsky during the years 1959 and 1960, which was intended to legitimize the studies; the other attitude involves the continuity of the tradition of british empirical linguistics.