A Corpus Linguistic Approach to Linguistic Variation

Abstract

Linguists have long been aware of the fact that language is not a homogeneous phenomenon but rather a complex of many different varieties. Over the years, however, linguistic variation has remained a problem area in linguistics and linguists in their descriptions of language have tended to abstract away from this variability Studies of linguistic variation have been restricted to the setting up of small scale hypothetical models which have contributed fairly few insights in the phenomenon of language variation In part the apparent failure to cope with the complexity of such a phenomenon as language variation can be attributed to the fact that linguists have not been very well enquipped to carry out large scale formal empirical analyses which would enable them to systematically very extra-linguistic factors and examine the accompanying linguistic variation. The present paper seeks to answer two main questions. 1) why, while obviously well-equipped for such an undertaking, corpus linguistics has so far failed to play any substantial role in the study of linguistic variation, and 2) what role can it play in the future, especially now that recent developments in the field of corpus linguistics have provided the means to get access to data that before could only be obtained on a very small scale or not at all, while at the same time, various techniques have been discovered and/or further develo

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 54 citations exist upstream.