The Fundamental Principles of Corpus Linguistics. Tony McEnery and Vaclav Brezina

Abstract

In the past decades, corpus methods have been extensively utilized in the research among social scientists and linguists in digital humanities (Bach, 2019; Luhmann and Burghardt, 2021). However, there is still some variance and misuse in the way how research problems are approached in the field of corpus linguistics, as a dynamic and fast-developing perspective to studying language use. It is the case for some scholars that they choose the corpus method in order to ‘use the corpus’ rather than truly facilitate their research methodology. Focusing on a number of fundamental issues in corpus linguistics, this thought-provoking volume The Fundamental Principles of Corpus Linguistics, written by Tony McEnery and Vaclav Brezina, seeks to spell out the reasonable grounds of how corpus data can be most effectively relied on to advance our understanding of language in digital humanities. This book comprises an introduction and eight chapters, which can be divided into three function-related parts: (1) to present forty-eight principles that, taken together, describe the ontological sense of the digitally realized approach to (social) science in general and corpus linguistics in particular (Chapters 1–5); (2) to provide a concrete illustration of how these principles negotiate in the repeatable and replicable process of linguistic research (Chapters 6 and 7); and (3) to conclude the epistemological position of corpus linguistics as an empirical discipline of digital scholarship in the humanities (Chapter 8). In the introduction, McEnery and Brezina point out the limited consideration of fundamental principles of corpus methods in the study of language, highlight the theoretical reference of this book on the critical realism from Karl Popper, and clarify that their true aim is to encourage fresh perspectives on established issues in traditional corpus linguistics, all of which foreground the subsequent three main parts.