http://www.corpus4u.org/showthread.php?t=680
Earlier post by wzli
There are different users of corpora:
corpus referenced or supported: the corpora are used to support or illustrate some prefabricated ideas. The use of the corpus evidence is quite opportunistic as the process is quite selective: the user only incurs the instances that are supportive to the points made while ignoring all the other conflicting data. The only thing can be said of this is that the examples are 'real' as they are particularly picked up from a corpus rather than invented hot and fresh from one's own brain (I know some people do like this when they are so carried away to growing trees).
corpus based: usually one or more hypotheses are attested against the corpus data and the conclusion can be open. Most of the researches in language teaching and learning could be corpus based as we might expect our data to be as 'real' and 'authentic' as possible.
corpus applied: when one tries to apply the corpus in other fields for practical purposes, say classroom concordance, data driven learning, machine translation, one faces a wide area and a great variety of applied researches on corpus linguistics.
corpus driven: suggested by Sinclair and Tognini-Bonelli, it says something like you start from the scratch and allow yourself to be driven by the hard data. One never knows what he or she will be faced with until he or she gazes at the corpus data.
But personally I feel myself unconvinced by such a label "corpus driven". Can anyone really be driven by a corpus? All researches start from some ontological standing and certain ideas of what is going to be done. Whatelse, the perception, processing, and interpretation of the data all happen inside. But we might still use the term in our own interpretation: we may allow ourselves to be driven by a corpus to find out answers to the puzzles and questions we have on our mind specifically related to that corpus.
earlier post by xiaoz
The sharp distintion between corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches is proposed by Tognini-Bonelli in her 2002 book "Corpus Lingusitics at Work" (Benjamins). However, the distinction is quite fuzzy in reality, as many have observed. If corpus-driven is defined as such in Tognini-Bonelli (2002), I would reject this term and use corous-informed instead. A further discussion of this distinction can be found in my posting at