Many rooms with corpora
Résumé
Linguistics, like all areas of human intellectual endeavour has many schools of thought that operate in a seamless continuum out of which we create so-called disciplines. Once we have isolated the disciplines we like to talk of multidisciplinary research as if disciplines have a real temporal existence. They do not. However, disciplines are necessary in that to understand the world we need to break it down into understandable units. These allow a sense of belonging and also the means to develop a particular aspect of language study. Hence linguistics schools of thought have developed into the various disciplines as pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and corpus linguistics. All of these look at language and interact in different ways. All of these can make use of computers, but they do not necessarily have to become computational sociolinguistics for example. A computer is a mere tool. This is the case with corpus linguistics, a branch of language studies that needs computers to analyse large amounts of authentic data called corpora, the corpus is the object, the computer a tool. Obviously there is considerable overlap between corpus linguistics and natural language processing, but they are not the same thing. Both benefit from their similarities, and their differences. It is the same with other disciplines that use corpora. This paper looks at why it is necessary to respect the tenets of all disciplines and not to attempt to water down corpus linguistics.
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