ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how the scientific method is applied to corpus research. New researchers are entering the field. Some arrive from scientific disciplines schooled in experimental methods of other sciences, others come from literary disciplines where this kind of thinking is unfamiliar. Researchers could set up physical experiments where, for example, mass and colour vary, and then compare the flight paths of balls fired from a cannon. Many controlled ‘laboratory’ experiments use stimuli, ‘cues’ or artificial conditions to encourage particular behaviour. To consider a corpus or corpus collection constituting the available data for a study. It is defined by a sampling frame – a set of criteria used by the corpus compilers to decide what to collect. With some exceptions, corpus linguistics is notable for the publication and sharing of source data. The dominant trend in corpus linguistics is to build ever-larger ‘flat’ tagged corpora and employ greater reliance on computation.
