Early Corpus Linguistics
"Early corpus linguistics" is a term we use here to describe linguistics before the advent of Chomsky. Field linguists, for example Boas (1940) who studied American-Indian languages, and later linguists of the structuralist tradition all used a corpus-based methodology. However, that does not mean that the term "corpus linguistics" was used in texts and studies from this era. Below is a brief overview of some interesting corpus-based studies predating 1950.
Language acquisition
The studies of child language in the diary studies period of language acquisition research (roughly 1876-1926) were based on carefully composed parental diaries recording the child's locutions. These primitive corpora are still used as sources of normative data in language acquisition research today, e.g. Ingram (1978). Corpus collection continued and diversified after the diary studies period: large sample studies covered the period roughly from 1927 to 1957 - analysis was gathered from a large number of children with the express aim of establishing norms of development. Longitudinal studies have been dominant from 1957 to the present - again based on collections of utterances, but this time with a smaller (approximately 3) sample of children who are studied over long periods of time (e.g. Brown (1973) and Bloom (1970)].
Spelling conventions
Kading (1897) used a large corpus of German - 11 million words - to collate frequency distributions of letters and sequences of letters in German. The corpus, by size alone, is impressive for its time, and compares favourably in terms of size with modern corpora.
Language pedagogy
Fries and Traver (1940) and Bongers (1947) are examples of linguists who used the corpus in research on foreign language pedagogy. Indeed, as noted by Kennedy (1992), the corpus and second language pedagody had a strong link in the early half of the twentieth century, with vocabulary lists for foreign learners often being derived from corpora. The word counts derived from such studies as Thorndike (1921) and Palmer (1933) were important in defining the goals of the vocabulary control movement in second language pedagogy.
Other examples
Comparative linguistics, and syntax and semantics can be read about in Chapter 1, page 3 of "Corpus Linguistics".