2.4.1 The Firthian Tradition

Our present view of corpus linguistics should to a large extent be attributed to J.R.Firth（18901960）who laid the theoretical foundation of a contextual theory of meaning and was the first to bring‘collocation’as a technical term into linguistics.

According to Wei（2002：14），we should note at least four points concerning Firth’s notion of collocation.The first derives from Firth’s famous statement that“you shall know a word by the company it keeps”（1957a）.In other words，the study of collocation is the study of the word accompaniment.Second，collocation is seen by Firth as a mode of meaning（1957b：190215）and is given its own level of description（‘collocational level’）.Third，collocation reflects an order of mutual expectancy and therefore，each word in a new context is a new word.The last point concerns the notion of‘colligation’as co-occurrence of grammatical choices abstracted from collocation.

Two key concepts in Firthian linguistics are worthy of an extra note.One is that of“repeated event”，as he states that“we must take our facts from speech sequences，verbally complete in themselves and operating in contexts of situation in typical，recurrent，and repeatedly observable”（1957b：35）.The other one concerns his special emphasis on the importance of“attested data”（ibid：29）.However，the pervasive nature of collocation in language was not observable even at the time when Firth died.Nor did he make any serious attempt to systematically delimit collocation and colligation.It is with the development of large and computerized corpora，that we can fully explore what is typical，recurrent and repeatedly observable.Such corpus work has been done by a group of Neo-Firthians led by John Sinclair.Sinclair develops a number of innovative and even radical ideas that deserve special mention and we shall discuss some of the most important，namely，the relations between lexis and grammar，the idiom principle and the extended unit of meaning.