How empirical has linguistics become?
The idea for this paper arose when Diana McCarthy and I were compiling our forthcoming anthology of corpus linguistics publications (Sampson and McCarthy, in press). We looked for pieces that illustrate the various facets of the field, ranging from Charles FriesÃs pioneering work of fifty years ago forward to 2002; and we decided that rather than grouping the anthology selections thematically, it would be more enlightening to mix the topics up and arrange the chapters of our book chronologically. We did not set a high premium on recency when selecting anthology items (often, a subject is illustrated more clearly by the publication that first inaugurated and defined it than by later articles which take for granted many things that new readers will not know). Nevertheless, I took it that later decades would be represented by more items than earlier decades in the eventual collection. Once the selection process was complete, though, the pattern turned out to be more dramatic. The density
