Corpus-based Approaches to Evolutionary Dynamics in Language

Abstract

Pragmatic-interactional aspects of present-day language use as well as historical language change have come to be regarded as an important source of evidence for theories of language evolution. Corpora, i.e. collections of authentic language data, are an important resource for studying both of those aspects of linguistic dynamics. This chapter gives an overview of corpus-based approaches to language change and their implications for evolutionary linguistics. In the first part of the chapter, we outline the basic principles of corpus linguistics, discussing the notion of corpus itself as well as the scope of corpus-linguistic approaches. In the second part, we review representative case studies that show how corpus studies can be used to approach questions about the dynamics of language in interaction on the one hand, and in historical language change on the other.