Does corpus linguistics exist? Some old and new issues

Does corpus linguistics exist? Some old and new issues

Jan Aarts

University of Nijmegen

Abstract

This  paper  deals  with  a  number  of  methodological questions  in  corpus  linguistics.  It
discusses various kinds of linguistic data and examines the nature and use of corpus data
and the function of corpus annotation. These topics are put within the context of two recent
issues  in  corpus  linguistics:  the  new  evidence  that  has  become  available from  spoken
corpora such as COLT  and the spoken part of  the  BNC,  and the renewed discussion of
corpus linguistic methodology, notably about the distinction between the corpus-based and
the corpus-driven approaches.

Introduction

It is difficult to attach a date to the birth of corpus linguistics, but if we take it to
mean computer corpus linguistics (see Leech 1992) we can locate its origin early
in the 1960s, at the time when the computerization of the the Brown Corpus was
finished. For about a decade and a half the use of corpora belonged very much to
the linguistic underground, and the term ‘corpus linguistics’ did not come into use
until it began to gain some respectability in the late seventies or early
eighties.Today it is taken seriously by the majority of linguists. Not by all of them
– Chomsky’s position, for example, is still as negative as it was in the sixties:
[Corpus linguistics] doesn’t exist. If you have nothing, or if you are stuck, or if
you’re worried about Gothic, then you have no choice. (Chomsky in an interview
with Bas Aarts; Aarts 2000: 5)

Other theoretical linguists take a less diehard view. Fillmore recently

described his position with respect to the use of corpora as follows:

My  peace-making  position  [in  Fillmore  1992  –  JA]  was  that  one
couldn’t  succeed  in  the  language  business  without  using  both
resources:  any  corpus  offers  riches  that  introspecting  linguists  will
never  come  upon if  left  to  their meditations; and at  the  same  time,
every  native  speaker  has  solid  knowledge  about  facts  of  their
language that  no  amount of  corpus  evidence, taken by  itself, could
support or contradict. (Fillmore 2001: 1)

That feelings about this issue can still run high became apparent in a recent
discussion on the corpora list, where (after almost 40 years!) we could renew the

Jan Aarts

acquaintance with  some  arguments we  hadn’t  seen  come  by  for  some  time.  In
many  such discussions it  is  not clear  what  exactly is  at  issue, however. Is  it  a
discussion about  the  question  which  data  sources  are  the  most  appropriate  for
linguistic  research?  Is  it  a  clash  between  different  methodologies? Or  is  it  –
perhaps  more  basically  –  a  disagreement  about  what  should  the  object  of
linguistic study? More  generally, such issues come  down to the  question: what
kind of linguistic discipline is corpus linguistics? Is it a linguistic discipline in its
own right? Or, to borrow Chomsky’s provocative words: does corpus linguistics
exist?

In this paper I want to deal with such questions by looking at two

important things going on in corpus linguistics at the moment. First, there appears
to be a new focus on spoken language – this is beginning to receive the same sort
of  attention  that  the  written  language  has  received  so  far.  Notably  there  is  a
widening of the attention given to the spoken language so as to also include its
syntax  and  to  contrast  this  with  the  syntax  of  the  written  language. This  new
attention showed itself, for  example, in Miller and Weinert’s book Spontaneous
Spoken Language: Syntax and Discourse (1998). On the basis of corpus material
from  English,  German  and  Russian,  they  analyse  the  differences  between  the
syntax and discourse of spontaneous speech and written language, claiming that
the  differences  are  such  that  they  have  far-reaching  consequences  for  theory-
oriented linguistic research. In 1999 another book appeared that bears the stamp
of a new  focus on the spoken language: the Longman Grammar  of Spoken and

Written  English  (Biber  et  al.).  And  finally, an  important  new  resource  for  the
research  into  spoken  English  became  available  in  2000,  namely  Anna-Brita
Stenström’s  Corpus  of  London  Teenage  Language  (COLT).  Containing  the
spontaneous speech of a young generation of native speakers, it is bound to put its
stamp  on  the  research  of  spoken  English  in  the  near  future;  it  has  already
generated a considerable list of publications.

A second important recent development is a renewed interest in and

discussion  of  questions  of  methodology.  I  have  already  mentioned  the  recent
dicussion on the corpora list, which centred on the old question of intuitive data
vs. corpus data. The issue returned at the 2001 ICAME conference, notably in the
keynote lecture by Fillmore, entitled ‘Armchair linguistics vs. corpus linguistics
revisited’  (Fillmore  2001),  a  title  which  echoed  his  earlier  paper  delivered ten
years  previously  at  the  Stockholm  Nobel  Symposium  on  corpus  linguistics
(Fillmore  1992).  At  the  same  conference  another  contribution on  methodology
was made by Tognini-Bonelli. This was only sideways related to the intuitive vs.
corpus  data debate, but more  concerned with  methodological matters  that arise
once the linguist has chosen for the use of corpus data. It thus raises an issue that
is  internal to  corpus  linguistics and  therefore  probably  more  important for  the
discipline. It  is  concerned  with  the  question how  dominant  a  status  should be
assigned  to  the  data  in  corpus  linguistic research.  Putting  this  differently,  the
question is not what data the linguist thinks it is appropriate to use, but what he

Does corpus linguistics exist? Some old and new issues

should do with them. In this connection Tognini-Bonelli distinguishes the corpus-
based approach and the corpus-driven approach. She describes the two as
follows:

...  corpus-based  work  relates  corpus  data  to  existing  descriptive
categories adding a probabilistic extension to  theoretical parameters
which  are  already  received,  i.e.  established  without  reference  to
corpus evidence. On the other hand, corpus-driven work attempts to
define the  categories of  description step  by  step, in  the  presence of
specific evidence from the corpus. (Tognini-Bonelli 2001b: 99)

Whether a researcher will prefer a corpus-based or a corpus-driven approach
depends on the answers he will give to a number of basic questions: 1. what
kind of evidence does he think corpus data provide? 2. does he want to leave
room  for  other  than  corpus  data?  3.  what  should  be  the  role  played  by
previous linguistic research that was not based on corpus data? As said, these
are  basic  questions and  a  discussion  of  them  and  of  the  corpus-based  vs.
corpus-driven  distinction is  called  for.  In  what  follows  I  shall  look  more
closely  at  the  two  issues  mentioned;  I’ll  start  with  the  methodological
question and after that discuss the new research into the spoken language in
relation to it. At the end we return briefly to the question posed in the title.

Methodology

Any discussion of corpus linguistic methodology must start from the data – after
all the discipline bears the name of a linguistic data source and in its present form
arose  as a challenge to the preference  of  the linguistic mainstream for  intuitive
data. In this section we first look at the different kinds of data that linguists have
used and are using. After that we discuss the different ways in which linguists use
corpus  data  in  their  research.  In  the  last  sub-section  we  examine  the  role  of
annotation in corpus linguistic research.

2.1

Types of linguistic data

A  survey  of  the  different  kinds  of  linguistic  data  is  presented  in  Figure  1
(reproduced from J. Aarts 2000). The major distinction is between intuitive and
non-intuitive data.  In  the  practice  of  linguistic research  it  is  still  more  or  less
tacitly assumed that intuitive data provide direct access to a  speaker’s  intuitive
knowledge of the language, that is, to some sort of internalized rule system, but
this has been shown  not to  be  the case; instead, intuitive data appear to reflect
what  a  speaker believes to be true of language behaviour in concrete situations
(see, for example, Snow and Meyer 1977; Nagata 1989; Shohamy 1996).

Jan Aarts

Figure 1. Types of linguistic data

Introspective data were the favourite type of intuitive data during some decades in
the  previous century; it  was  usual for  the  linguist to consult his  own intuitions
about  the  language.  It  has  been  pointed  out  repeatedly  that  such  data  are
unreliable: they are subjective and unverifiable and there is confusion of the two
roles the linguist plays – that of native speaker and that of linguistic researcher.
Some  of  these  drawbacks  can  be  overcome  by  collecting  informant  data:  the
linguist does not consult his own intuitions, but those of others. The collection of
informant data is a difficult and time-consuming job (see, for example, Quirk and
Svartvik  1966; de  Mönnink 2000). As  a  consequence, informant data have not
been used very frequently nor very extensively.

Non-intuitive data are provided by what people actually say and write. The

material has to be on record in some form or other to serve as workable data for
linguistic research; this is always the case with written and printed material. It is
not surprising, therefore, that until quite recently, if it was claimed that linguistic
studies were based on ‘authentic material’, this was usually written material. The
distinction that is made in Figure 1 between anecdotal and corpus data has not to
do with the type of data involved, but with the manner of collecting them. Briefly
put, anecdotal data are collected unsystematically, while corpus data are compiled
systematically. Most of the  standard reference grammars  of  English of  the first
half  of  the  previous  century  contain  anecdotal  data.  They  were  collected  in  a
haphazard  way:  whenever  the  grammarian  happened  to  read  something  that
caught his attention, he made a record of it. Thus, Jespersen (pt II, 1914: vi) talks
about  ‘my  quotations,  which  I  have  collected  during  many  years  of  both
systematic and desultory reading’ and Poutsma (pt I, 2nd ed., 1928: vii) says:

anecdotal data

corpus data

other native
speakers:
informant data

linguistic
introspection

non-intuitive

intuitive

linguistic
data

Does corpus linguistics exist? Some old and new issues

[My]  quotations have  partly  been  borrowed  from  dictionaries and  from
other grammars. But by far  the majority of them have been collected by
myself from numberless and varied sources: not only literary and scientific
books, but also periodicals and newspapers.

Other twentieth-century grammarians have said similar things (see, for example,
Schibsbye 1965: v).

Anecdotal data are inferior to corpus data in two respects. In the first

place, the grammarian will only collect examples that ‘catch his attention’ and is
not interested in what he expects to find. Jespersen said that, whenever he could,
he  selected  sentences  that  were  in  some  way  ‘striking’  (ibid.).  For  this  reason
anecdotal  data  are  not  only  necessarily  skewed,  but  the  subjective  element
involved  in  their  collection  is  not  recoverable.  Another,  more  important,
drawback of anecdotal data is that they become isolated from  both their micro-
and  macro-context;  that  is  to  say,  they  are  deprived  of  their  immediate  verbal
context and the contextual features that are relevant for  their specific form, and
become  separated  from  their  larger  sociolinguistic  context,  including  genre,
register,  style,  domain,  etc.  As  said  above,  anecdotal  data  provide,  next  to
intuitive data, the material for most of the twentieth century reference and other
grammars. Sometimes the emphasis is on intuitive data, as is the case in Sweet’s
grammar where we find hardly any authentic data – practically all the examples
he gives to illustrate points of syntax are made-up sentences. Other grammarians
use  anecdotal  data  exclusively  (Jespersen,  Kruisinga)  or  predominantly
(Poutsma). In view of the fact that both intuitive data and anecdotal data have a
good deal of subjective colouring, it is perhaps at first sight a bit surprising that
their descriptions of the English language are so homogeneous. This can partly be
explained from  the fact that most grammarians relied, of course, to a greater or
lesser  extent  on  previously  written  grammars.  Reading  the  prefaces  of  the
grammars  one  can  see  for  example  that  Jespersen,  Poutsma,  Zandvoort  and
Strang  express  their  indebtedness to  Sweet,  while  Sweet,  Poutsma,  Zandvoort,
Strang  and Schibsbye say  that they are  (also)  specially indebted to  Jespersen  –
and  this  chain of  interdependence between  grammars  can  be  traced throughout
the  century. Another  factor  is  that  the  variety of  English they describe  is  very
homogeneous: on the whole, not only do they concentrate on British English and
on  educated standard language, but they are  predominantly concerned with  the
written language and with general language about non-specialized subjects.

In most twentieth-century grammars the relation between the description

and the data is not clear. When grammarians use authentic material they usually
regard this as a source to choose their examples from; with the exception of Fries
(1952), they do not treat their material as a data collection that has to be
accounted for. In this connection it is typical that Jespersen and Poutsma speak of
their ‘quotations’ (see above). Even in A Grammar of Contemporary English and
A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, which we know to be

Jan Aarts

closely  related  to  corpus  data, the  relation between data and description is  not
clear,  owing  to  the  fact  that  the  writers  decided  to  ‘refrain  from  citing  actual
utterances with references to sources. Most of our examples are either simplified
versions of actual utterances or invented’ (Greenbaum 1988: 46). I return to the
question of the relationship between description and corpus data below.

2.2

Corpus data: Their nature

The most important difference between corpus data and other kinds of linguistic
data is that in the former case their provenance is known: they are found in the
natural environment of the verbal context, we know in which medium they occur,
to  what  linguistic or  extra-linguistic textual  category, what  (type  of)  language
user  produced them,  and so  on. In  other  words,  corpus data reflect  the  way  in
which  language  is  actually  used.  Now,  language  use  is  what  most  descriptive
grammars profess to want to give an account of. At the same time it must be said
that there is a not inconsiderable number of utterances that one comes across in
corpora but will look in vain for in descriptive grammars of language use. Among
them are broken-off sentences, false starts, repetitions of phonemes, morphemes,
words and (parts of) larger constituents, anacolutha, stretches of text from other
languages or from sub-standard varieties, as well as utterances that the speaker or
writer intended to be ungrammatical; in short, corpora contain among other things
evidence  of  ‘such  grammatically  irrelevant  conditions  as  memory  limitations,
distractions, shifts of attention and interest and errors ...’ Chomsky 1965: 3). In
other  words,  what  one  finds  in  a  corpus  is  ‘performance’,  that  is,  evidence of
linguistic  behaviour.  And  linguistic  behaviour  is  not  only  determined  by
linguistically  relevant,  but  also  by  linguistically  irrelevant  conditions.
Linguistically relevant are  all  aspects of the verbal context (or  ‘micro-context’)
and  all  the  parameters  imposed  by  the  sociolinguistic  setting  (the  ‘macro-
context’). It seems reasonable, therefore, to say that a descriptive grammar should
give an account of the system of rules underlying language use together with the
linguistically relevant parameters  that  determine the  form  of  utterances in  their
context. It  is  of course not at all an easy  matter to decide what, in a corpus, is
linguistically  relevant  and  what  not.  Various  terms  and  notions  have  been
proposed for the assessment of linguistic relevancy, all of which make an appeal
to  some  sort  of  consensus  among  native  speakers,  sometimes  supported  by  a
criterion of frequency. Of these, the first was ‘acceptability’ defined by Chomsky
(1965: 11) as the quality of ‘utterances that are perfectly natural and immediately
comprehensible  ...  and  in  no  way  bizarre  or  outlandish’.  Quirk  and  Svartvik
(1966)  tried to  operationalize the  notion of  acceptability, adding a  quantitative
dimension. Widdowson (1991) introduces the concept of ‘feasibility’  as a  filter
for corpus data; excluded are those data that do not meet a criterion of normality.
Finally,  in  an  earlier  article  (Aarts  1991)  I  suggested  using  the  notion  of
‘currency’,  which  is  compounded  of  the  frequency  of  occurrence  of  a
construction and its ‘normalcy’ which is a qualitative and intuitive notion, closely

Does corpus linguistics exist? Some old and new issues

resembling Widdowson’s ‘normality’. All in all, it is likely that there is a
consensus among corpus linguists that not every construct, by virtue of its
appearance in a corpus, has to be taken into account in a description of the corpus
language, but that every corpus will contain constructs that can be excluded on
the basis of their not meeting an intuitive criterion of naturalness or normalcy.

2.3

Corpus data: Their use

I started this paper with two quotations from theoretical linguists to illustrate their
attitude to corpus data. However different in tone they may be, they both illustrate
the same basic attitude towards corpus data: corpus data are supplementary with
respect to intuitive data. As such they may be held in low esteem, as Chomsky
does when he says that they are only relevant ‘if you are stuck’, or highly valued
as Fillmore does, but there can be no doubt about the primacy of intuitive data,
for these rest, as Fillmore (see above) puts it, on the ‘solid knowledge [of every
native speaker] about facts of their language that no amount of corpus evidence,
taken by itself, could support or contradict’. In other words, in the view of both
linguists the corpus is used to jog the linguist’s intuition.

Other linguists assign a more important role to corpus data. They see the

corpus not as a supplementary, but as an indispensable tool for the research into
language use. There are two purposes for which corpus data can be exploited that
could not possibly be achieved by using another kind of data. The first of these is
the  examination of  language  variety  –  the  only  way  to  reveal  similarities  and
differences  between  language  varieties  is  to  make  a  comparative  study  of  the
frequency and distribution of linguistic phenomena in corpora representing these
different varieties. So far, this has probably been the most extensive use to which
corpus data have been put; it has been the subject of many individual studies and
this  strand  of  research  has  come  to  fruition  for  the  first  time  in  a  reference
grammar of English (Biber et al. 1999).

The second research activity for which corpora are indispensable is their

use as a test bed for linguistic hypotheses about the language. What can be tested
is  primarily  the  knowledge  accumulated  in  the  literature  about  one  or  more
aspects  of  the  language  or  the  ‘complete’  descriptions  of  the  grammar  of  the
language  laid  down  in  reference  grammars.  In  order  to  test  a  hypothesis
consistently and exhaustively on corpus data a formal grammar is needed that can
be translated into a computer program which analyses the corpus utterances in the
way  specified  in  the  formal  grammar.  The  formal  grammar  should  be  a
transparent linguistic tool, the computer program an efficient parser. Testing the
linguistic hypotheses by analysing a corpus will involve of course a test of their
correctness, but what is at least as important is a test of their completeness – does
the formal grammar have sufficient coverage to account for the corpus data? This
is especially important if it is a ‘complete’ grammar that is tested, for in that case
the starting point for the formal grammar is – apart from the linguist’s intuitions –
the knowledge accumulated in reference grammars. And because the description

Jan Aarts

found  in  reference  grammars  is  largely  limited  to  the  written  language;  the
syntactic  canon  provided  by  them  is  therefore  bound  to  contain  gaps  in  the
description.

As said, for the two research activities mentioned above – varieties

differentiation  and  hypothesis  testing  –  corpora  constitute  an  essential  data
source.  Both  start  from  the  knowledge  accumulated  in  previous  research,  the
former  using  it  as  a  basis  for  the  comparative study  of  language varieties,  the
latter  testing  it  for  its  correctness  and  completeness.  This  implies  that  both
research  activities are  representative of what  Tognini-Bonelli calls the  ‘corpus-
based approach’ in the quotation given in the introductory section of this paper.
As early as 1985 Sinclair rejected this approach, saying that:

The categories and methods we use to describe English are not
appropriate to the new material We shall need to overhaul our
descriptive systems. (Sinclair 1985: 252)

In other words, in the face of ‘the new material’ it is no longer possible to
maintain the framework of description built up in the tradition of the English
grammars of the twentieth century. Instead, a ‘corpus-driven approach’ is called
for which emphasizes

... the  strict  interconnection between an item and its environment ...
[which] leads the corpus-driven linguist to postulate an ‘extended unit
of  meaning’  bringing  together  the  lexical,  the  grammatical,  the
semantic and the pragmatic levels. (Tognini-Bonelli 2001a: 11)

This extended notion of meaning is also referred to as a new ‘unit of currency’ for
linguistic description. The corpus-driven approach can therefore be looked upon
as  an  operationalization  of  Firth’s  ideas  about  the  essential  role  of  context  in
linguistic description and his conception of meaning, ideas which also prompted
Quirk’s  principle of  ‘total accountability’  (Quirk  1968: chapter 7).  Needless  to
say,  in  the  corpus-driven  approach  the  status  of  what  I  have  called  ‘the
accumulated knowledge about the language’ is called into question.

What is the status of intuitive data in the corpus-based and corpus-driven

approaches? Within the corpus-based approach their status is comparatively clear;
few  ‘corpus-based linguists’  will  hold  that  just  because  something occurs  in  a
corpus it has to be accounted for in a description of language use. Instead, most
will use a quality of ‘acceptability’ or ‘currency’ or ‘feasibility’ or ‘naturalness’
of  utterances as  a filter  to  ‘clean the  data’.  And  the  decision whether  or not to
assign this quality to an utterance is largely intuition-based. Ultimately, therefore,
a  ‘corpus-based  linguist’  allows  his  intuition  to  overrule  his  corpus  data  and
hence gives primacy to the former.

Does corpus linguistics exist? Some old and new issues

One would expect an opposite view in the corpus-driven approach, but the

position taken by Tognini-Bonelli is a bit ambiguous. Although she first asserts
that corpus evidence

... casts serious doubts on the role of intuition and introspection,
consistently proven to be unreliable when it comes to representing
exactly how language is really used ... (Tognini-Bonelli 2001a: 91).

she continues in the same passage:

Intuition will still be considered an essential input; it will play a big
part, for  instance, in selecting the phenomenon that the linguist will
choose  to  investigate, and  ultimately it  will  have  an  important role
when it comes to evaluating the evidence in the corpus.  (ibid.)

Two kinds of intuition might be involved here: the intuition the linguist has as a
researcher and his intuition as a native speaker. He will be using the former type
of  intuition when  he  selects the  phenomenon to  be  investigated. It  is  not quite
clear what is meant by ‘evaluating the evidence in the corpus’. The phrase might
apply  to  what  I  called above  ‘cleaning the  data’,  in  which  case  native speaker
intuition seems to be implied, but it may also refer to the researcher’s judgement
as to whether and how new corpus evidence fits in with his previous findings.
Summing up, I  think we  can  say  that each of  the three  attitudes to corpus data
distinguished above leaves room  for  intuitive data although certainly not to the
same degree.

2.4

The annotation of corpus data

A few words should be said about the annotation of corpus data. I restrict myself
to the annotation for the purposes of linguistic research.
After  what  has  been  said  above  about  the  corpus-driven  approach,  it  is  not
surprising that it rejects annotation. It is argued that the annotation imposes a pre-
existing theory on the corpus data and that therefore it ‘will ensure that the data
will finally fit the theory’ (Tognini-Bonelli 2001a: 73). Another argument that is
put  forward  against  annotation is  that  it  results  in  a  ‘loss’  or  a  ‘reduction’  of
information (Sinclair 1992: 385 f.; Tognini-Bonelli 2001a: 73). This argument is
a bit difficult to follow. How can the addition of information to items in a corpus
diminish the information contained in the items it is added to, if the two types of
information are  of  a  different  order?  For  the  information contained in, say,  the
tags added to the words of a text is information about the descriptive framework
that has generated the tags or, more precisely, about the distribution over the text
of  the  word  classes  that  are  part  of  the  descriptive  framework;  and  this
information is entirely different from that contained in the words of the text.

Jan Aarts

In the corpus-based approach, which, among other things, wants to collect

quantitative  data  about  the  categories  of  an  existing  descriptive  grammar,  or
wants to test an existing grammar on corpus data, (the process of) annotation is an
indispensable tool. For the collection of quantitative data the result of annotation
is important, while the annotation process is especially relevant for the testing of
a grammar. The  grammar  has a  paradigmatic and a  syntagmatic dimension: the
former involves assigning (strings of) items to classes, while the latter specifies
what  functional  relations  can  hold  between  the  members  of  these  classes  in
context.  These  two  linguistic  dimensions  nicely  correspond  with  the  two
computer programs by means of which annotation is usually carried out: a tagger
and  a  parser.  Now,  although  annotation  is  very  often  not  carried  beyond  the
tagging stage, it will be clear that for the testing of a grammar that claims to give
a ‘complete’ description of general language use an integral annotation requiring
both tagging and parsing will be necessary.

Summing up, it can be said that perhaps the most prominent difference

between the corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches is in their attitude to
annotation; whereas it is an indispensable tool for the corpus-based approach, it is
anathema for linguists subscribing to the corpus-driven approach.

Spoken language research and methodological issues

In the introductory section I mentioned some landmarks that point to a heightened
interest  in  the  spoken  language. While  considerable attention has  been  paid  to
matters relating to intonation and discourse ever since the London-Lund corpus
became available, there is now a shift, or perhaps rather an extension, of interest
to  the  syntactic  structure  of  spoken  language,  which  may  have  received  its
impetus from the availability of new resources such as COLT and the spoken part
of  the  BNC.  I  mentioned  two  recent  books  that  are  representative  of  the  two
strands  of  corpus-based  linguistics I  distinguished in  Section  2.3:  Biber  et  al.
(1999)  and  Miller  and  Weinert  (1998).  The  former  extends  the  scope  of  a
syntactic  description  of  general  English  to  also  include  a  characterization  of
language varieties in terms of the frequency and distribution of structures, and in
doing  so  leans  heavily on  the  syntactic canon  of  standard  descriptions and  on
annotated data reflecting these.

(see Biber et al. 1999: 6–7). The second book

raises a more fundamental question with respect to the difference between spoken
and written language: are the differences marginal, so that they can be captured in
a series of ‘footnotes’ to a description of the written language, or are they such
that they have important consequences for linguistic theory, as Miller and
Weinert claim? Both books take existing descriptions as their point of departure,
the one as a means to achieve a result (i.e. varieties differentiation), the other to
test their correctness and completeness. They are therefore firmly ingrained in the
corpus-based approach. This is not the place for an evaluation of the two books
and to assess whether Biber et al. is the last word on varieties differentiation or to

Does corpus linguistics exist? Some old and new issues

determine if Miller and Weinert make good their claim; I have mentioned them
because they illustrate the focus on spoken language syntax and because they
represent the two main strands in corpus-based research.

In the rest of this section I want to concentrate on the second strand of

research: the use of corpus data to test the adequacy and completeness of an
existing descriptive grammar. Unlike varieties differentiation, it does not accept
an existing description as an established fact. It is willing to assume that current
descriptions of English, based as they are mainly on the written medium, ‘are not
appropriate to the new material’, to borrow Sinclair’s words. It is therefore closer
to the corpus-driven approach. However, it does not take Sinclair’s statement as
axiomatic and as a point of departure for research, but merely accepts it as a
possibility.

As I argued above, in order to test an existing description consistently and

exhaustively  on  corpus  data,  it  needs  to  be  captured  in  a  formal  grammar.
However, testing a grammar on corpus data is less easy than it sounds. In the first
place, the test does not simply imply the yes-or-no decision whether a given parse
is successful or fails. The full extent of failure occurs of course when the parser
fails  to  yield  an  analysis  for  a  given  utterance.  But  it  is  also  possible that  an
analysis is yielded, but is ‘wrong’ in the sense that a structure is assigned which
under no contextual conditions can ever be correct. Finally, it may happen that a
grammatically  correct  analysis  is  assigned  that  is  contextually  inappropriate.
Whenever an instance of one of these three types of failure occurs, the linguist
must settle the question whether it is due to an error or omission in the description
underlying the  formal  grammar  or  due to  a  mistake in  the  formalization of  the
description –  unfortunately there  is  no  one-to-one correspondence between  the
type of failure and the location of its cause. The testing of a grammar on corpus
data is therefore a laborious and time-consuming process, requiring the full force
of  the  linguist’s  attention  and  ingenuity.  Every  single  utterance  needs  to  be
inspected manually, and errors and omissions traced back to their location either
in the formalization of the description or in the description itself; in the latter case
it  must  be  determined  whether  or  not  the  utterance  in  question  needs  to  be
accounted for in the description/grammar or not (see Section 2.2).

Now, in the practice of corpus linguistic research it is not usual to go to

the  trouble of formalizing a  description of  general language and converting the
formal  grammar  into  a  (tagger  and)  parser  for  the  sole  purpose  of  testing  the
grammar and the description. On the contrary, an effort like that is normally only
made  for  the  purpose of  producing a  parsed  corpus for  future  research.  Such  a
project, undertaken by the TOSCA team of the University of Nijmegen, was the
development and implementation of a tagger and parser for the ICE project (see
Greenbaum 1992; Aarts 1992; Aarts et al. 1998) and its subsequent application to
ICE-GB by the Survey team of University College London. Experiences with the
ICE  project  have  taught  us  that  one  should  continually be  on  the  alert  not  to
‘stretch’  the  grammar  too much  to  make  it  fit the  data (see  Aarts  and Oostdijk

Jan Aarts

1997: 111 ff.). Working in the other direction, a number of problematic utterances
in  the  spoken  material  were  ‘solved’  by  the  Survey  team  by  adding to  them  a
‘normalized’  version  which  could  be  dealt  with  by  the  parser  without  any
problems. The possibility that the pressure of having to produce a  syntactically
annotated corpus can lead to making ‘the data ... fit the theory’ (Tognini-Bonelli
2001a: 73) in some way or other is therefore not entirely unreal. Ideally, it would
be best to keep the production of a parsed corpus separate from the testing of a
grammar to check the correctness and completeness of its underlying description,
and to carry them out as two distinct research activities.

The confrontation of the TOSCA tagger and parser with spoken material

has  led  to  an  enhanced  view  of  the  descriptive  framework  that  served  as  its
starting point, which leads us to believe that the corpus-based approach starting
from  a  pre-existing  description can  be  effective  and  rewarding.  The  enhanced
descriptive framework is shown schematically in Figure 2 (reproduced from Aarts
1999).

Figure 2. Enhanced descriptive framework

The top part of the figure represents what I have called above ‘the

syntactic  canon’.  It  is  entirely  based  on  the  notion  of  constituency  and  the
hierarchical  relations  among  constituents.  These  relations  are  nearly  always
expressed  by  syntactic means  and  are  of  three  kinds: dependency, government
and  concatenation.  Dependency  manifests  itself  in  all  subordination/
superordination structures, government in complementation structures, where the
governing element  may  impose  a  particular  form  on  the  element  realizing  the
complement,  while  concatenation  involves  compounding,  coordination  or
apposition.  The  building  blocks  for  the  lower  part  of  the  figure  are  also
constituents, but the only ‘structural’ relation with their environment derives from
the  one-thing-next-to-the-other  principle  –  there  is  no  attempt  whatsoever  at
syntactic  integration. A  distinction can  be  made  between  simple  parataxis  and

Does corpus linguistics exist? Some old and new issues

interrupts, which are elements interrupting regular consistency; a subclass of
these can be used to reformulate (a part of) a constituent which immediately
precedes.

An instance of simple parataxis is found in the italicized part of the

following example:

(1) I have been the radioman for the last couple months or so – last guys got

transferred, I moved up.

An example of summative reformulation is found in (2):

(2) Bartlett was the only member of staff to sport a beard, which bobbed up

and down when he talked, a process Lucy found fascinating to watch.

As the last example shows, parataxis also occurs in the written language,
although it is much more frequent in speech. The utterance in (3) offers a good
example of its frequency – it contains several instances of parataxis of various
kinds, both on phrase level and on clause level:

(3)

and it becomes an accepted wisdom that people in certain areas one of
them is London that have certain income bands the middle classes if you
like the affluent middle classes that they should go private that they will
go private.

Parataxis  differs  from  concatenation  in  that  the  latter  is  usually  marked
syntactically and  is  fully  integrated  in  the  constituency of  sentences,  with  the
concatenated  constituents  always  forming  a  clearly  delineated  higher-order
constituent. The distinction between constituency and parataxis is not an absolute
one; they can be seen as the two extremes on a scale of syntactisation. Paratactic
and constituent-like variants of constructions can exist side by side: an example is
(paratactic) direct speech by the side of (syntactically integrated) indirect speech
and mixed forms in between these two extremes.

Relations between structural phenomena like constituency and parataxis

and, more in general, extensions and revisions of an accepted descriptive frame-
work will only emerge, of course, if one takes that framework as one’s starting
point, as is usual in the corpus-based approach.

Conclusion

Returning to the question posed in the title of this paper, we can ask ourselves
another: when can we say that a particular linguistic research activity constitutes a
linguistic discipline in its own right? Surely not by virtue of its use of a particular
type of data – corpus linguistics does not distinguish itself from another linguistic

Jan Aarts

discipline like theoretical linguistics on account of the fact that it uses corpus
data, nor would theoretical linguistics become a subdivision of corpus linguistics
if all its practitioners should suddenly agree that corpus data are as valuable as
intuitive data. The picture begins to change a little bit if the use of corpus data is
not so much a question of preference but of necessity; neither the corpus-based
nor the corpus-driven approach can do without the use of corpora. And perhaps
the fact itself that these two approaches exist side by side can be regarded as a
sign of an independent discipline – it is a bit difficult to maintain that a discipline
that accommodates two competing methodological approaches does not exist.

However, what really distinguishes one discipline from another is a

differerence in the object of study. And in this respect there really is a difference
between  theoretical  linguistics  and  corpus  linguistics:  whereas  the  former  is
concerned  with  the  phenomenon  of  language  in  general  (call  it  the  language
faculty, competence, I-language or universal grammar) and its object of study is
therefore  language-independent,  corpus  linguistics  is  concerned  with  language
use, that is, with the way in which a given language system manifests itself in a
particular  context  and  cultural  environment.  It  aims  therefore  not  only  at  an
understanding of the language system, but also of the parameters that determine
the selection from the possibilities offered by the language system and thus shape
the ultimate form that utterances must take in order to be appropriate within their
micro-  and  macro-context.  So  yes,  corpus  linguistics  does  exist,  and  it  is  a
discipline  harbouring  two  mutually  exclusive  methodologies, the  corpus-based
and  the  corpus-driven approaches,  which,  in  all  likelihood, will  come  up  with
different  but  complementary  results  that  together  will  give  a  fuller  picture  of
language in use.

Notes

In what follows I shall go on using the term ‘corpus linguistics’ as if it does.

See

www.hit.uib.no/colt

A revised version of the corpus is due to appear in the

autumn of 2001.

An exception must be made for two grammarians who can be looked upon as

corpus linguists avant la lettre: Fries (1952) and Scheurweghs (1959). Their
grammars are firmly based on corpus data.

Sinclair (1984) discusses the ‘naturalness’ of sentences, a term which at first

sight seems to imply the same sort of intuitive judgement. However, he describes
the quality of naturalness as being determined by the degree to which an utterance
obeys the constraints of the context.

See Biber et al. 1999: 7: ‘The overriding goal has been to use categories and

terms that are familiar and unobjectionable to the widest range of grammar users.
Since CGEL is terminologically conservative, generally following informed

Does corpus linguistics exist? Some old and new issues

tradition in its choice of grammatical terms and categories, we have rarely
departed from its overall framework.’

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