Читать книгу Introduction to Corpus Linguistics - Sandrine Zufferey - Страница 19

In this chapter, we have defined corpus linguistics as an empirical discipline, that is, based on the observation of real data. We have also seen that corpus linguistics often resorts to a quantitative methodology, studying a large sample of data which is representative of the phenomenon studied, with the aim of generalizing the observations to the whole of the language or to a language’s register. We have shown that the main difference between corpus linguistics and experimental linguistics is the way in which empirical data are collected. In the case of corpus linguistics, data are collected in a natural context and then observed, whereas in the case of experimental linguistics, one or more causes are manipulated within a controlled context in order to observe their effects. Finally, we have seen that corpora can be very diverse in nature, depending on whether they are made up once and for all or incremental, general or specialized, annotated or not, monolingual or multilingual, synchronous or diachronic.