What is corpus evidence and how can it be used to track language change over time?

• A. It is a random sampling of texts.
• B. Corpus evidence is large, systematically collected text data.
• C. It cannot track frequency changes.
• D. It is only used for modern languages.

Answer: (B)

Corpus evidence is large, systematically collected text data. It isn’t just a scattered set of sample texts; each text is typically tagged with metadata like date, genre, and author, and the collection is built to be as comprehensive and representative as possible.

That structure lets you quantify how language is used across different periods. By comparing time-stamped corpora, you can track changes in word frequencies, see whether certain grammatical constructions become more or less common, and observe shifts in which words tend to appear together (collocations). You can also examine how a word or construction is used in context over time by looking at concordance lines, which helps reveal any changes in meaning or usage.

This empirical approach is powerful because it moves from anecdote to measurement, so you can map language change across centuries or decades and test ideas about when and why shifts happened. Of course, the usefulness depends on how the corpus was created and what kinds of texts it includes, so researchers account for sampling and genre biases when interpreting trends.