<i>Corpus Linguistics: Readings in a Widening Discipline</i> edited by SAMPSON, GEOFFREY, &amp; DIANA MCCARTHY

GEOFFREY SAMPSON, & DIANA MCCARTHY . ( Eds .). Corpus Linguistics: Readings in a Widening Discipline . New York : Continuum , 2005 . Pp . xiv, 552 . $49.95, paper . ISBN 0--8264--8803--X . Corpus linguistics, the study of authentic language data based on a sizeable body of text, is a methodological approach in linguistics that is well established. It is applied in a variety of fields, ranging from historical linguistics to the study of the spoken language of London teenagers, new Englishes, or the analysis of Internet communication. Technical developments have changed the face of corpus linguistics from the predigital age, when sizeable amounts of text were processed manually, to the first computerized corpora (notably the Brown corpus of written American English sampled from material published in 1961), the advent of modern mega-size corpora like the British National Corpus (BNC), to the recent challenges presented by the exploitation of the World Wide Web as a corpus and for corpus building. Edited by two computational linguists from the University of Sussex, Corpus Linguistics is a collection of 42 articles intended to “comprehensively illustrate the directions in which the subject is developing” and act as a guide to the novice in corpus linguistics, as the text on the cover promises. It is beyond the scope of this review to evaluate the chapters individually. Instead, it addresses whether the articles collected in this volume serve as a guide to the newcomer.x Following a brief introduction detailing the main developments in the field from the computational linguist's point of view, the articles are arranged chronologically, with brief introductory comments that relate them to other articles in the collection or to the field as a whole (sometimes useful background information on the prevalent linguistic model of the time is given, e.g., p. 9). It opens with a contribution from the preelectronic age, two chapters from C.C. Fries's Structure of English (1952); the penultimate chapter by Kilgariff (2001) is a now much-quoted discussion on the pros and cons of using the Web as corpus. Thus, the volume spans the whole range of topics since the beginning of corpus linguistics in the middle of the 20th century. The fact that the editors are computational linguists has not tempted them to include more material in the volume that deals with natural language processing than papers that are “humanist” (to use the editors' terminology, p. 5). With 15 out of 42 chapters, the technical aspects of corpus linguistics (annotation, tagging, and parsing) are given their fair share all the same. The editors' decision to order the articles chronologically rather than by subject matter was motivated by their aim (p. 5) to represent the overlap between the philological analysis of language with the help of computer corpora and what computational linguists contribute to this endeavor. With the exception of two chapters (5, 22), however, most contributions are fairly easy to compartmentalize as humanist or technological, and a third section could have been made up of methodological discussion (i.e., ch. 2, 3, 8, 17, 42, 10). The chronological ordering of chapters, however illuminating to the expert in corpus linguistics, may leave the newcomer somewhat disoriented, despite the useful introductory comments to each chapter. In addition to these comments, explicit information in the introductory chapter on type of corpora, corpus-based versus corpus-driven approaches, fields in which corpus linguistics has been applied (historical, sociolinguistic, structural, etc.), and references to relevant chapters might have been helpful. The reference section could also have been extended by the inclusion of introductory works to corpus linguistics. As it stands, the novice in corpus linguistics is likely to get lost among the trees and lose sight of the forest. The editors draw attention to the longstanding opposition between corpus linguistics and intuition-based language theorizing. This controversy is reflected explicitly in one of the chapters (Staffan Hellberg's paper on the corpus used for the Swedish Academy Grammar, ch. 13). A classic on the topic that was also presented at the 1991 Nobel Symposium, Fillmore's “‘Corpus linguistics’ vs. ‘Computer-Aided Armchair Linguistics’” (published in 1992 in the proceedings edited by Jan Svartvik), however, is not only missing in the volume but fails to be mentioned anywhere. According to a statement in the introductory chapter, “much of the impetus for creation and analysis of English-language corpora, on the European side of the Atlantic, has come from Continental experts on teaching English as a foreign language” (p. 2). It is therefore surprising that only two chapters are concerned with issues of language teaching (ch. 22 on collocations for language learning; ch. 26 on the relation between language corpora and syllabus design) and only one with the analysis of learner language (ch. 32). In the introduction, the editors claim that English corpus linguistics has dominated the field for the longest time (p. 2). It is therefore not surprising that the volume reflects this fact: The majority of papers deal with English, and only four chapters are concerned exclusively with languages other than English. The fact that the editors are not always well versed in the philological aspect of English corpus linguistics becomes apparent in only one introductory comment (to Tent and Mugler's plea for the compilation of a Fijian component for the International Corpus of English), where they claim that “English is a language which comes in two standard versions, British and American, each supported by its own apparatus of dictionaries, usage manuals, and the like” (p. 276). English is a pluricentric language with more than two national standards: Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, and South African English have also been codified, albeit more recently than American English. Having been a corpus linguist for many years, I read the articles in the volume with great interest. My experience from teaching introductory classes in corpus linguistics tells me that the volume will provide an excellent source for additional reading, but it will have to be used alongside books such as Graeme Kennedy's (1998) and Charles Meyer's (2002) textbooks, or the most recent addition to the textbook market, the resource book by McEnery, Xiao, and Tono (2006).

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