Corpus Linguistics and Cognitivism

The following article is meant to discuss the status of corpus linguistics, how it is seen and sees itself as a field: Is it merely a method of doing linguistics, or can it be considered a distinct approach to language description? In our argument, we claim that corpus linguistics is on the way of becoming more than a methodology, since its research results are increasingly interpreted with regard to their impact on the commonly held views about language. Dealing with these interpretations, we have noticed a number of similarities with assumptions made by cognitive linguistics, and we aim at showing that the two trends—corpus linguistics and cognitivism—are compatible in that they complement each other.