The Computer Learner Corpus: a Versatile New Source of Data for Sla Research

Since making its first appearance in the 1960s, the computer corpus has infiltrated all fields of language-related research, from lexicography to literary criticism through artificial intelligence and language teaching. This widespread use of the computer corpus has led to the development of a new discipline which has come to be called 'corpus linguistics', a term which refers not just to a new computer-based methodology, but as Leech (1992: 106) puts it, to a 'new research enterprise', a new way of thinking about language, which is challenging some of our most deeply rooted ideas about language. With its focus on performance (rather than competence), description (rather than universals) and quantitative as well as qualitative analysis, it can be seen as contrasting sharply with the Chomskyan approach and indeed is presented as such by Leech (ibid.: 107). The two approaches are not mutually exclusive, however. Comparing the respective merits of corpus linguistics and what he ironically calls 'armchair linguistics', Fillmore (1992: 35) comes to the conclusion that 'the two kinds of linguists need each other. Or better, that the two kinds of linguists, wherever possible, should exist in the same body.' The computer plays a central role in corpus linguistics. A first major advantage of computerization is that it liberates language analysts 'from drudgery and empowers [them] to focus their creative energies on doing what machines cannot do' (Rundell and Stock 1992: 14). More fundamental, however, is the heuristic power of automated linguistic analysis, i.e. its power to uncover totally new facts about language. It is this aspect rather than 'the mirroring of intuitive categories of description' (Sinclair 1986: 202) that is the most novel and exciting contribution of corpus linguistics. English is undoubtedly the language which has been analysed most from a corpus linguistics perspective. Indeed the first computer corpus to be compiled was the Brown corpus, a corpus of American English. Since then English corpora have grown and diversified. At the time, the one million words contained in the Brown and the LOB were considered to be perfectly ample for research purposes, but they now appear microscopic in comparison to the 100 million words of the British National Corpus or the 200 million words of the Bank of English. This growth in corpus size over the years has been accompanied by a huge diversification of corpus types to cover a wide range of varieties: diachronic, stylistic (spoken vs. written; general …