Introduction

The preceding chapter concluded the survey of corpus methods in different fields of linguistics with which the latter part of this book has mainly been occupied. We have looked at the intersection of corpus methodologies with areas such as discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, language change, functionalist linguistics and psycholinguistics. In this final chapter, we will reflect on what we can conclude about the status of corpus linguistics within linguistics – looking at trends evident in the history of corpus linguistics up to the present time and considering how those trends are likely to continue, or, rather, how we think they should continue. In particular we will consider the future of corpus analysis within a framework of methodological pluralism, and the potential for corpus methods to extend beyond the field of linguistics into other areas of the humanities, sciences and social sciences. How, for example, can the methods and findings of corpus linguistics and computational linguistics continue to usefully interact? How can corpus methods be utilised in the analysis of the textually mediated world found in humanities subjects such as history, literary criticism and religious studies? And how can new methods in linguistics – for example, new approaches to neurolinguistics – inform the findings of corpus-based analyses through the process of methodological triangulation?

The story of corpus linguistics, from past to future

By surveying the variety of approaches to, and applications of, corpus linguistics over the past forty to fifty years, we have presented what may be called the ‘story’ of corpus linguistics. But what is the overarching theme of this narrative? In our view, essentially two broad phases in the history of corpus linguistics may be observed. The first stage, up to about the end of the 1980s, centres around the emergence of corpus linguistics primarily within two different schools of English language studies, its struggle to establish itself in the face of Chomskyan views inherently opposed to the use of corpora, and the formation of the basic set of methods and tools. The theme of the second phase, from that point up until the present day, has been the shift in the nature of corpus linguistics as an enterprise that we have outlined in the latter part of this book. From being in practice a semi-independent subfield of linguistics – whether considered one in theory by its practitioners or not – corpus linguistics has become an indispensable component of the methodological toolbox throughout linguistics. The subfield labelled corpus linguistics that could have been coherently argued to exist in, say, 1990, is no longer so easily distinguishable from other forms of linguistics – and as we argued in the previous chapter, this rapprochement is even observable for the subset of neo-Firthian corpus linguists who do attempt to distinguish corpus linguistics as a separate field of linguistics.