Geoff Thompson and Susan Hunston (eds): System and Corpus: Exploring Connections.
Sheena F. Gardner · Applied Linguistics · 2009
The blurb's claim that ‘This book is the first to combine interests in two currently popular approaches [Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Corpus Linguistics (CL)] to language description’ [emphasis added] may be challenged. Nevertheless, this is an important contribution to both, and likely to become as influential as Hunston and Thompson's earlier collection, Evaluation in Text. As Thompson and Hunston more modestly explain in their somewhat provocative introductory chapter, since SFL is essentially a theory of language, CL is essentially a method for investigating language, and both are concerned with naturally occurring language as text, they are complementary, if not productively synergic. Following a caricature of SFL as theory heavy and therefore not open to what the data might throw up, and CL as theory light and therefore not approaching language systematically, Thompson and Hunston each provide general overviews of their respective approaches which make the book accessible to non-specialist readers. If corpus linguists are simply those who focus on corpus data (p. 102), then being an SFL corpus linguist is unproblematic (and most shunt effectively between manual and automated analyses). The challenge to SFL comes from the Sinclair corpus-driven tradition (p. 8), as illustrated in the next three chapters.