It is important to understand the kind of linguistic evidence that corpora are best able to provide .Since the Chomskyan revolution of the 1950s,linguistics has always regarded itself as a science in which "empirical" evidence is used to advance linguistic theory .For the Chomskyan linguist,this evidence was often obtained through "introspection":the gathering of data based on the linguist's own intuitions .Because many corpus linguists have found this kind of evidence limiting ,they have turned to the linguistic corpus as a better source of empirical evidence-for "real"rather than "contrived" examples of linguistic constructions and for statistical information on how frequently a given linguistic construction occurs in a corpus.
2011-10-13, 09:35
