Charles C. Fries, linguistics and corpus linguistics

Abstract

Halliday has long claimed that information concerning the relative frequencies of the various options within a system should be considered part of the system itself. Such a position entails that linguists have some basis for describing these frequencies. Hence SFL has made considerable use of corpora and of corpus linguistics. Of course, the field of corpus linguistics is commonly regarded as a brand new approach to linguistics which has developed and become popular over the past forty years—since the development of computers. Like all new fields, however, its roots lie in earlier forms of the discipline. This paper addresses one of the forebears of this field, Charles C. Fries. He thought of himself simply as a linguist (not a corpus linguist), yet his theory and practice have much in common with current versions of corpus linguistics and SFL.