When someone is referred to as a “corpus linguist,” it is tempting to think of this individual as studying language within a particular linguistic paradigm, corpus linguistics, on par with other paradigms within linguistics, such as sociolinguistics or psycholinguistics. However, if the types of linguistic analyses that corpus linguists conduct are examined, it becomes quite evident that corpus linguistics is more a way of doing linguistics, “a methodological basis for pursuing linguistic research” (Leech 1992: 105), than a separate paradigm within linguistics.

To understand why corpus linguistics is a methodology, it is first of all necessary to examine the main object of inquiry for the corpus linguist: the linguistic corpus. Most corpus linguists conduct their analyses giving little thought as to what a corpus actually is. But defining a corpus is a more interesting question than one would think. A recent posting on the “Corpora” list inquired about the availability of an online corpus of proverbs (Maniez 2000). This message led to an extensive discussion of how a corpus should be defined. Could something as specific as a computerized collection of proverbs be considered a corpus, or would the body of texts from which the proverbs were taken be a corpus and the proverbs themselves the result of a corpus analysis of these texts?

The answer to this question depends crucially on how broadly one wishes to define a corpus.