Reflecting on the quantitative turn in linguistics

Linguistics, English linguistics in particular, has witnessed a remarkable quantitative turn since the 1990s and the early 2000s. It was a turn both in scale and in quality, a turn concerning the degree (including the degree of sophistication) to which quantitative empirical studies, statistical tec...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Linguistics 2021-09, Vol.59 (5), p.1207-1226
Main Author: Kortmann, Bernd
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Corpus linguistics
corpuslinguistics
English language
entrenchment
Linguistics
multi-method design
probabilistic linguistics
processing complexity
Qualitative research
Quantitative analysis
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Summary:Linguistics, English linguistics in particular, has witnessed a remarkable quantitative turn since the 1990s and the early 2000s. It was a turn both in scale and in quality, a turn concerning the degree (including the degree of sophistication) to which quantitative empirical studies, statistical techniques, and statistical modelling have come to be used and determine linguistic research. Which role have corpus linguistics and probabilistic linguistics, including usage-based approaches, played in this development? Has this turn been to the detriment of qualitative methods, or even of linguistic theorizing in general? Has linguistics reached the point of a “quantitative crisis”, or is it still a discipline characterized by a healthy equilibrium, if not mutual reinforcement, of quantitative and qualitative approaches? What are, or should be, major repercussions of the strong quantitative turn for the publication system of (English) linguistics? These are the major overarching questions underlying the reflections offered in this opinion paper.
ISSN:0024-3949
1613-396X
DOI:10.1515/ling-2019-0046