Introduction

Václav Cvrček

Masako Fidler

pp. 1-8

in: Masako Fidler, Václav Cvrček (eds), Taming the corpus, Berlin, Springer, 2018

Abstract

Empirical linguistics has always gravitated towards quantification. With the advent of electronic corpora—large, searchable sets of natural language data, quantification has become part and parcel of linguistic studies. In the past few decades in particular, we have witnessed a "quantitative turn" in various schools of linguistics (cf. Janda, 2013 for cognitive linguistics) and in the digital humanities which was further accelerated by the advent of text corpora. This volume aims to showcase a variety of recent quantitative approaches that "tame the corpus"; it shows how language corpora can be used for research questions of interest to students and scholars in the humanities and social scientists. It simultaneously fills a lacuna in mainstream English-based quantitative linguistic studies by demonstrating that quantitative methods applied on inflectional language may reveal novel phenomena.