Conversational corpora : when “big is beautiful”

The goal of this paper is to examine the relationship between corpus size and conclusions drawn from corpora regarding questions of grammatical theory. Many linguists, typically those with a ‘usage-based’ orientation, assert that introspective data, unlike corpus-derived data, is of little relevance to the construction of the correct theory of language. This paper challenges that view, arguing that introspective data and corpus-derived data do not lead to different conclusions about the nature of linguistic theory.