Reflecting on the quantitative turn in linguistics

Abstract

AbstractLinguistics, English linguistics in particular, has witnessed a remarkable quantitative turn since the 1990s and the early 2000s. It was a turn both in scale and in quality, a turn concerning the degree (including the degree of sophistication) to which quantitative empirical studies, statistical techniques, and statistical modelling have come to be used and determine linguistic research. Which role have corpus linguistics and probabilistic linguistics, including usage-based approaches, played in this development? Has this turn been to the detriment of qualitative methods, or even of linguistic theorizing in general? Has linguistics reached the point of a “quantitative crisis”, or is it still a discipline characterized by a healthy equilibrium, if not mutual reinforcement, of quantitative and qualitative approaches? What are, or should be, major repercussions of the strong quantitative turn for the publication system of (English) linguistics? These are the major overarching questions underlying the reflections offered in this opinion paper.