ABSTRACT
Diachronic analysis is intrinsically comparative, in fact 'a prerequisite for diachrony is that at least two different time points are compared'. Gries and Hilpert lament that 'in both synchronic and diachronic linguistics, there often seems to be an underlying assumption that there is one, single, reasonable way of dividing up the corpus into different parts'. A corpus that covers an unbroken stretch of time may also use years as units for data collection, but it allows for finer-grained divisions that can be derived bottom-up. Renouf describes Modern Diachronic Corpus linguistics as 'an area ripe for growth' and offers a list of ways to use diachronic corpora, hinting that the area is still largely under-researched; this is particularly true for discour se-oriented diachronic work. If the RASIM and Islam projects are the main reference for diachronic work of trend-mapping, the work done on the SiBol corpora accounts for a fundamental block of corpus-assisted discourse studies on temporal comparisons.
