State-of-the-Art Review of the Corpus Linguistics Field From the Beginning Until the Development of ChatGPT

Abstract

The present paper highlights the recent state of and development in the corpus linguistics (CL) field. Although several reviews have been conducted on CL, these reviews have focused on specific areas, such as education, or did not provide an overall clear overview of the future implications of the field (Baker et al., 2008; Biber & Reppen, 2020; Biber et al., 1998; G. N. Leech, 1991; Mcenery et al., 2019; McEnery & Hardie, 2012). The author begins this paper with providing an overview that can guide new researchers in this field as well as postgraduates who require a general historical and thematic map of CL. The general overview discusses the publications of scholars who have participated in this field as well as the central tools that have been applied in CL. For specific details regarding the development of the field, the author analysed 217 articles from the 3 highest-impact factor journals according to the Web of Science over the last four years (2019–2022). The findings reveal a rapid development of the field in terms of practical and methodological perspectives, specifically regarding the investigations of language uses in different contexts. Thus, this paper indicates a significantly strong correlation between CL and technological development, such as natural language processing (NLP), and how this approach could fill the research gap of utilising CL in other areas of linguistics.