Cognitive linguistics meets the corpus

A first empirical turn in cognitive linguistics (CL) occurred in the mid–1990s, when researchers began to apply psycholinguistic methods to CL research questions, which quickly gained widespread acceptance in the field. More recently, a number of CL researchers have turned to corpus-linguistic methods, but these are not yet widely accepted. This is surprising, given the strong commitment in the CL community to ‘usage-based’ models of language. In this paper, I take up a number of ideas from construction grammar and cognitive linguistics and confront them with corpus data and corpus methods in order to show how such data may be used to address cognitive linguistic research issues that are difficult or impossible to address in other ways.