Which among the following is true about corpus linguistics?
A) It is a collection of naturally occurring spoken and written texts.
B) It has ensured the supremacy of speech over writing.
C) It is about the teaching of linguistics at the school level.
D) It is a methodology that involves computer based empirical analysis of language use.
E) It is a branch of linguistics that is purely based on Chomskyan linguistics.
Choose the correct answer from the options given below:

The correct answer is A and D.

Let us break down the concepts of corpus linguistics to understand why statements A and D are correct, while the others are incorrect:

Statement A: "It is a collection of naturally occurring spoken and written texts."
This statement is correct. A "corpus" (plural: corpora) in linguistics refers to a structured, large collection of authentic, real-world language texts (both spoken and written) that have been gathered for linguistic analysis. These texts represent actual language usage rather than invented or artificial examples.

Statement D: "It is a methodology that involves computer based empirical analysis of language use."
This statement is also correct. Corpus linguistics is primarily a methodology rather than a separate branch of linguistics. It relies heavily on computers to store, search, and analyze massive amounts of language data empirically (deriving patterns, frequencies, and rules from actual usage observations).

Now, let us examine why the other statements are incorrect:
• Statement B is incorrect because corpus linguistics does not prioritize or establish the "supremacy" of speech over writing; it studies both forms of communication objectively based on the corpus data.
• Statement C is incorrect because corpus linguistics is not focused on school-level teaching curricula, although corpus data can be used to inform pedagogical materials.
• Statement E is incorrect because Chomskyan linguistics (generative grammar) traditionally favors rationalist, intuition-based competence over empirical, performance-based corpus data. Therefore, corpus linguistics is not based on Chomskyan theories.

Hence, the statements that are true about corpus linguistics are indeed A and D.