8 - The convergence of corpus linguistics, psycholinguistics and functionalist linguistics

Summary

Introduction

As we have seen in Chapter , functionalist linguistics in the broad sense (including cognitive linguistics) is increasingly making use of corpus-based methods, and in turn informing the analyses of corpus linguists. In this chapter, we will show that this phenomenon extends as well to experimental psycholinguistics. We will also discuss the implications of the rapprochement of functionalist linguistics and psycholinguistics with corpus linguistics with regard to the neo-Firthian school of thought which we surveyed in Chapter ; we will argue that in the neo-Firthian school, this rapprochement with functional linguistics has taken a very different form. As we saw in Chapter , one of the bases of the neo-Firthian or so-called ‘corpus-driven’ approach is a rejection of non-corpus-derived theoretical frameworks. To explicitly adopt a functionalist theory as the basis for a corpus-driven study would be distinctly peculiar from the neo-Firthian perspective. Indeed, some of the stronger forms of the neo-Firthian position – such as that espoused by Teubert, for instance – explicitly reject the notion of a convergence of neo-Firthian corpus linguistics and functional or cognitive linguistics, with Teubert (: 2) claiming that corpus linguistics ‘offers a perspective on language that sets it apart from received views or the views of cognitive linguistics, both relying heavily on categories gained from introspection rather than from the data itself’. Nevertheless, we wish to argue that such a convergence is in fact taking place, stemming on the neo-Firthian side from work by Sinclair and others from the 1990s onwards. Our basis for making this case is that, when we closely examine the findings of the most extensively developed neo-Firthian theories – in particular, Pattern Grammar and Lexical Priming – we will find that many of these conclusions have also been arrived at by one or more branches of functional linguistics or psycholinguistics. These congruent conclusions stem from wildly different sets of evidence and are, of course, expressed using very different descriptive apparatus. But certain fundamental insights – namely, the inseparability of lexis and grammar, and the nature of grammar as secondary to, and emergent from, lexis – have been arrived at by both functional linguists and neo-Firthian corpus linguists, largely independently of one another.