Abstract
A comprehensive study of the stages of formation and development of corpus linguistics has been carried out. The aim of the article is to analyze the scientific approaches to the issue of scientific significance of the considered linguistic discipline, as well as to identify a set of concepts and criteria that constitute the foundation of this direction. The relevance of the article is determined by the fact that linguistic corpora have great potential, which has not yet been fully comprehended by the scientific community, if only because the text the main object of corpus linguistics in its various forms of implementation is one of the main components of the language system and the speech activity of a modern speaker. The principal novelty of the results of this study allows us to speak of the legitimacy of creating corpus dictionaries and corpus grammars of a new generation, designed and verified in relation to a particular fixed corpus. The novelty of the analysis lies in the fact that the appropriateness of corpus research as an essential requirement of the time, associated with the new quality of linguistic reality and meeting the needs of modern society is confirmed. The article examines the main stages in the formation of corpus linguistics as a scientific field, describes scientific ideas and approaches, peculiar to each of these stages, and provides an overview of the main principles of corpus linguistics in domestic and foreign linguistics. We analyze in detail the debate between representatives of different scientific schools and identify the advantages of one or another approach, tracing the similarities and differences between the approaches to the study of corpora at different historical stages of the formation of the studied scientific field.