The empirical trend

Linguistic science of the past half-century has often been distorted through neglect of normal scientific standards of empirical falsifiability. An earlier paper in this journal used a quantitative literature survey to examine how far in practice the newer trend towards use by linguists of corpora and other empirical data sources had progressed. The result was ambiguous: a trend towards greater empiricism had occurred since about 1970, but around the turn of the century it appeared to have reversed, and the end of the period surveyed (2002) fell so soon thereafter that it was hard to guess whether this reversal was a blip or a long-term change. With a further decade of linguistic literature to examine, the present paper repeats the survey using a more systematic sampling technique, and this yields results that are much more clearcut than those of the earlier paper.