"Corpus Linguistics and the History of English: When the Past Meets the Future". 2016. (With Begoña Crespo) (original) (raw)

Corpus linguistics has revolutionised our way of working in historical linguistics. The painstaking job of collecting data and manually analysing them has been made less arduous with the introduction of the machine processing of corpora, which allows for quick and efficient searches. The aim of the present study is two-fold: to show how corpus linguistics has contributed to the ways in which researchers approach the study of the history of English, and to provide an overview of selected corpora available in the field. Setting aside the theoretical debate as to whether corpus linguistics should be considered merely a methodology, a branch of linguistics, or both (Taylor, 2008), it is widely acknowledged that corpus linguistics is of considerable help in any branch of linguistics, be it theoretical or applied. The use of corpora makes it possible to test hypotheses established within a specific linguistic area through the fast and reliable analysis of vast pools of material. As a result, the objective measurement of data is available to scholars, who can thus verify their hypotheses and intuitions, and can quickly amend or qualify their research claims if previous ones are seen to be falsifiable. There is, then, a continuous interaction within theory, as expressed in linguistic postulates, concepts and hypotheses, and an application and validation of these theoretical principles through the use of linguistic corpus analysis. The use of corpora is perhaps a more powerful instrument in the field of historical linguistics than in other fields, since the absence of living informants here makes judgements based on intuitions unreliable, and claims have to be empirically attested using data. This data can be extracted from systematically compiled collections of machine-readable texts, called corpora. However, in considering these undeniably advantageous working tools, some caveats should be borne in mind, as will be discussed in what follows.