Corpus Linguistics in Sweden : Pioneers and their context

This volume presents findings from research on the development of corpus linguistics in Sweden as a scientific innovation. It begins with a presentation of the early international development of corpus linguistics as well as the institutional and disciplinary conditions for research on the subject in Sweden, followed by accounts of the first generations of Swedish innovators. External funding and international development were important for these pioneers, alongside the fact that established professors in language departments seem to have been relatively open to the new ideas. The criticism levelled against corpus linguistics appears instead to have come mainly from departments of general linguistics. In the course of time, this negative attitude has diminished and corpora have become an almost indispensable tool in linguistic research. Developments in Sweden are placed in an international perspective by means of an analysis of the publication database SciVerse Scopus for 1970−1999. It shows a research field in two well-defined clusters: corpus builders and corpus users, the former often with a background in language studies, the latter evincing considerable representation of psychologists and scholars of cognitive science with an interest in language acquisition and language loss. Evidence of the significance of international developments for scientific innovation is provided by an analysis of the development of professional organizations on both sides of the Atlantic.RHES