Reconnecting Real Language with Real Texts

The connections between language and text (or "langue and parole, " or "competence and performance, " etc.) have been thoroughly obscured by a long-standing tendency to attribute an ideal order to language which is not reflected in texts and then to conclude that texts are too disorderly to be worthy of linguistic investigation. So almost a century of academic research has been devoted to constructing the order of ideal language from the top down by sheer theoretical bootstrapping. Today, corpus linguistics is enabling a dramatic return to real language whilst revealing previously undescribed modes of order in the connections between language and text.