Contributions of the corpus-based approach

Throughout this book we have emphasized the usefulness of the corpus-based approach for studying how speakers and writers use the linguistic resources available to them in their language. This approach takes advantage of: computers' capacity for fast, accurate, and complex analyses; the extensive information about language use found in large collections of natural texts from multiple registers; and the rich descriptions that result from integrating quantitative findings and functional interpretations. For these reasons, the corpus-based approach has made it possible to conduct new kinds of investigations into language use and to expand the scope of earlier investigations.

These advantages apply to the study of individual linguistic features as well as the characterization of language varieties. Thus, for example, the application of corpus-based techniques in lexicography make it possible to study the collocations of words in a comprehensive way, identifying differences in the preferred senses of related words. Similarly, many researchers in the past have been interested in differences between speech and writing, but until the development of corpus-based methods it was impossible to discover the patterns of co-occurring features and dimensions of variation that characterize the two modes.

As an approach to linguistics, corpus-based analysis provides a new perspective on language use. The findings of the example analyses presented in this book, as well as the findings of other corpus-based studies, show that there are strong, systematic patterns in the way that language is used.