Corpus-based Text Linguistics

Starting from the lesson Petőfi delivered in 2004 upon being awarded Laurea honoris causa from Turin University and from the Round Table that followed, our paper aims to trace the intertwined history of the relationship between corpus linguistics and text linguistics. Currently, that relationship is good and still improving, but that was not always the case: the role played by generative linguistics in opposing corpus linguistics is discussed in detail. The position of Petőfi, who was basically sceptical of the use of corpus linguistics, is traced back to this conflict. Finally we suggest that Petőfi’s textology - as he described it - might be seen as an extension of text linguistics encompassing multimodal aspects.