2.1 Planteamientos teóricos para la investigación basada en corpus

Nos gustaría empezar esta sección, en la que vamos a repasar los planteamientos teóricos y metodológicos que subyacen a casi todas la investigaciones basadas en corpus con una cita extraída de un artículo de Charles Fillmore, quizás uno de los lingüistas más influyentes de las últimas décadas. Hemos decidido incluir esta cita a pesar de su extensión, porque retrata muy acertadamente, en clave de humor- dos formas diferentes de entender el estudio de la lengua, de las que vamos a tratar en esta sección:

Armchair linguistics does not have a good name in some linguistic circles. A caricature of the armchair linguist is something like this. He sits in a deep soft comfortable armchair, with his eyes closed and his hands clasped behind his head. Once in a while he opens his eyes, sits up abruptly shouting, "Wow, what a neat fact!", grabs his pencil, and writes something down. Then he paces around for a few hours in the excitement of having come still closer to knowing what language is really like. (There isn’t anybody exactly like this, but there are some approximations.)

Corpus linguistics doesn’t have a good name in some linguistic circles. A caricature of the corpus linguist is something like this. He has all the primary facts that he needs, in the form of approximately one zillion running words, and he sees his job as that of deriving secondary facts from his primary facts. At the moment he is busy determining the relative frequencies of the eleven parts of speech as the first word of a sentence. (There isn’t anybody exactly like this, but there are some approximations.) These two don’t speak to each other very often, but when they do the corpus linguist says to the armchair linguist, "Why should I think that what you tell me is true?", and the armchair linguist says to the corpus linguist, "Why should I think that what you tell me is interesting?".

Fillmore (1992: 35)

Como apunta Fillmore, no existen lingüistas que se comporten exactamente de ninguna de esas dos formas, pero sí existen, o han existido, algunos que se han aproximado en algunos aspectos a una u otra postura. Pasamos a considerar algunos aspectos fundamentales que han sustentado ambas posturas.