Claimed and Unclaimed Sources ofCorpus Linguistics

Abstract

The promotion of the term Corpus Linguistics in the 1990s has marked an important milestone in the attempt of making corpus works a new mainstream discipline within Language Sciences. Since an international conference held in 1991 gathering British, Dutch, Swedish and Norwegian linguists (proceedings in Svartvik (ed) 1992), the researchers of the domain have strengthened their position by the publication of many collective books and text books and the creation in 1996 of an international journal The International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. So in 2002, Geoffrey Leech (b. 1936), a leading figure in corpus research, could speak of ‘the corpus linguistic world as a well-established research community’ (Leech, 2002:167). At the same time as they were giving themselves a name, dating the first occurrence of the term back to 1984 (Aarts and Meijs, 1984), these linguists attempted to provide the new domain with historical legitimacy. It is this issue that I would like to address in my paper in order to see under what conditions, but also at what cost, a common history has been claimed in order to found a new linguistic stream. In particular, it will be shown how the actors have retrospectively built their own history by overstating or forgetting some events, facts or methods.