English Corpus Linguistics

Abstract

Introduction While corpus linguistics need not restrict itself to any one language, the development of corpus linguistics as outlined in this book was very strongly influenced by work on the English language from the 1960s onwards. In this chapter that work will be overviewed, and its impact upon the development of both corpus linguistics and linguistics in general will be outlined. This chapter consciously takes its title from that of a book edited by Aijmer and Altenberg (). It does so because that classic collection of papers summarised the state of the art of that tradition at a key point in its development. Prior to the early 1990s, corpus linguistics was largely the preserve of people working in the tradition of English corpus linguistics. After this point, however, it became more and more a part of mainstream linguistics. It is this tradition of English Corpus Linguistics (abbreviated ECL) that will be reviewed in this chapter, with the progressive development of corpus linguistics being a key topic in Chapters 5 and 6, while its interaction with other kinds of linguistics is the underlying theme of Chapters 7 and 8. In this chapter, we will argue that ECL has been an important tradition in the history of corpus linguistics. However, while the developments in this chapter were linked to research undertaken on the English language, other languages were developing a tradition of corpus-based study at the same time. Leon () has rightly explored a simplifying Anglo-centric bias in accounts of the development of corpus linguistics, a bias which McEnery and Wilson () sought to avoid. Indeed, the very earliest work that might reasonably be considered to be corpus linguistics, undertaken in the context of humanities computing by Roberto Busa (see section 2.5), was based on a large number of languages other than English. Following on from Busa, other researchers, notably Alphonse Juilland (see, e.g., Juilland and Chang-Rodriguez ), built and used corpora for a number of purposes. Juilland developed a wide range of frequency dictionaries based on corpora with a similar balance and representativeness across a number of languages. As with Busa, Juilland's work is notable for its non-English focus. However, although work on non-English corpus linguistics in the latter half of the twentieth century was important, what distinguishes the work in ECL is that ECL was the crucible in which the approach to corpus linguistics reported in this book and others was formed. The major, systematic contributions of corpus linguistics to the improved description of the lexis and grammar of language were made within ECL. For example, key concepts such as collocation and corpus annotation were developed and refined in this tradition. Importantly, the tools discussed in Chapter 2 were also largely created in the context of ECL. In short, while not all work in corpus linguistics in the latter half of the twentieth century was focused on the English language, it was the network of scholars who did focus on English who largely defined the methods of corpus research as they are currently used in linguistics.