Fries

ICAME Journal No. 347. The analysis must be exhaustive and systematic. Preferably these analysesshould include relative frequency counts of patterns in contrast, where thecomparison of the patterns is based on similarities of meaning.The paper ends with an evaluation of several aspects of Fries’s work.1 IntroductionThe field of corpus linguistics is now generally considered to be a subfield oflinguistics that has developed largely since the early 1960’s when Henry Kuc v eraand W. Nelson Francis created the now famous Brown corpus of one millionwords. Further, it is now regularly presented as developing in opposition to thethen current dominant formalist version of linguistics, which distinguished anidealized ‘competence’ from actual ‘performance’, and which consistentlyemphasized the defective nature of performance while taking the study of competenceas its goal. One consequence of the formalists’ focus on competence hasbeen the regrettable (in the view of corpus linguists) neglect and devaluation ofactual language use (and samples of actual language use) as they created theirdescriptions and theoretical positions.In what follows, I do not want to contradict the general features of the abovesketch of the genesis of corpus linguistics as a discipline, for I recall a number ofconversations with Kuc v era and Francis in which they criticized the absence of‘real language’ from formalist accounts, and also recounted the overt oppositionof the then-dominant advocates of transformational grammar to their project ofgathering the Brown corpus. However, I would like to suggest an additionalinterpretation of the rise of corpus linguistics. In this interpretation, corpus linguisticsis a reassertion of older traditions in the study of language that were currentbefore the rise of formalist approaches. A number of these older traditionsrequired the gathering and study of some coherent body of data – a corpus. Theyincluded at least philology, dialect geography, and anthropological linguistics.(Another discipline that required the use of carefully gathered representativesamples of language, socio-linguistics as conceived by William Labov and hiscolleagues, developed about the same time as the initial stages of corpus linguistics.)Indeed, a significant part of my training at the University of Michigan andwith Kenneth Pike during the late 1950’s consisted of techniques to gather andrecord information in such a way that I would be able to retrieve relevant portionsof the information with relatively little effort. In modern parlance we werebeing taught a kind of data gathering and data retrieval as part of our training asordinary linguists. A further bit of evidence that corpus linguistics constitutes acontinuation of a tradition is the age of the initial proponents. Kuc v era and Fran-90