Corpora and experimental methods: A state-of-the-art review

This paper offers a state-of-the-art review of the combination of corpora and experimental methods. Using a sample of recent studies, it shows (i) that psycholinguists regularly exploit the benefits of combining corpus and experimental data, whereas corpus linguists do so much more rarely, and (ii) that psycholinguists and corpus linguists use corpora in different ways in terms of the dichotomy of exploratory/descriptive vs. hypothesis-testing as well as the corpus-linguistic methods that are used. Possible reasons for this are suggested and arguments are presented for why (and how) corpus linguists should look more into the possibilities of complementing their corpus studies with experimental data.