Corpus analysis and variation in linguistics (review)

This volume consists of nineteen scholarly articles, all written in English, preceded by two prefaces and an informative introduction by the editors. The book reports on an international symposium hosted by the Global Center of Excellence program ‘Corpus-based Linguistics and Language Education’ at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. The twenty-three contributors are affiliated with institutions in Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Singapore, and Turkey.

The volume is structured according to the language data analyzed: first a general paper (Durand), followed by five papers treating English data (Chambers; Tono; Pakir; Ooi; Ishii), one on German data (Geyken, Didakowski, and Siebert), two on French (Martineau; Detey), one on English/ French (Yazu), two on Spanish (Ueda; Ueda, Takagaki, and Tinoco), two on Turkish (Özsoy; Kawaguchi), one on Swahili (Abe), one on Malay (Uzawa), and three on Japanese (Shibuya; Abe; Kobayakawa and Umino).

Common to the contributions is an interest in (i) linguistic (including psycho- and sociolinguistic) analyses, (ii) (generally large) language corpora, and (iii) an educational perspective. Each contribution varies in its focus on one or two of these three aspects, but there is a unity in the view of data as crucial in science (see, for example, the passages in the long quotation from Goldsmith 2005:724 given as introduction to Durand’s paper: ‘no data, no science’ and ‘there is no right theory to speak of except insofar as theory is united with data’).

First, I comment on four articles that seem to me particularly interesting from a general linguistic point of view, but other papers (mentioned below) could also have been selected. Jacques Durand’s paper, ‘On the scope of linguistics: Data, intuitions, corpora’ (25–52), takes its point of departure in the ‘Chomskyan turn’ (26). As Durand rightly says, ‘one could, of course, agree with Chomsky that the object of linguistics is the study of cognitive systems internalized by speakers-hearers and disagree on the idea that it cannot be accounted for by general mechanisms available to humans in other domains’ (27). The other serious issue here is whether the methods used in the Chomskyan paradigm are capable—in principle and in practice—of answering the cognitive questions mentioned. Durand presents an interesting discussion of central problems in the Chomskyan attitude toward data and descriptions in linguistics, as echoed in the following quotation: ‘Chomsky is much more the inheritor of the structuralist tradition [than] he acknowledges’ (41) (this has been a common view among European linguists for decades, despite n. 6 on p. 41). Durand gives two convincing test cases from French (derivations with -able and liaison) showing that corpus analysis is necessary to reach the correct linguistic description. On the whole, his paper is, in my view, a well-balanced discussion of the relation between data, intuitions (which he argues are still much needed), and corpora, as well as how they interact with linguistic theory.

Two important papers combine a psycholinguistic and an educational perspective. J. K. Chambers’s ‘Education and the enforcement of Standard English’ (53–66) investigates accusative nonaccord (in cases like between you and I vs. between you and me) and shows that the nonstandard form (with I) is neither a stylistic nor (in general) a geographical variant (nor does it represent an ongoing change). Instead, it is correlated with level of education, and Chambers explains it psycholinguistically: ‘In the course of casual conversation, it is evidently a strain on the cognitive system to keep track of the scope of the case to the second conjunct’ (63). He further elaborates that concord and agreement rules are typical of standard languages (that are enforced through the educational system).

In ‘Phonetic input, phonological categories and orthographic representations:Apsycholinguistic perspective on why language education needs oral corpora’ (179–200), Sylvain Detey argues (by overviewing some experiments) for the importance of fine phonetic detail for language processing and acquisition. He concludes, convincingly in my view, that learners...