Linguistic Research and Linguistic Evidence

This paper attempts to probe into the relationship between linguistic research and linguistic evidence. A comparison is made between two major traditions in language research in terms of their use of linguistic evidence. Different from the mainstream Chomskyan approach, which argues that linguistics is a branch of cognitive psychology and that the description that is of greatest psychological relevance is the account of competence, not that of performance, an alternative tradition, represented by Halliday, regards the text as the object of linguistics along with the system. Examples from recent corpus research are cited to show the importance of authentic data to a more accurate description of language.