Conceptual unity of form and values: a case-based approach to research of the operation of language phenomena

The article considers practicability and viability of corpus approaches to cognitive and functional-pragmatic features of linguistic units based on some modern English-speaking corpora. We discuss our findings of the contrastive analysis of this approach with the traditional ones and present abundant supporting data to prove that corpus data provide for linguistic validity and representativeness of the research into structural normalization/variability of linguistic phenomena, their communicative efficiency, and conceptual integrity of forms and meanings. The article concludes that the formalistic separation of forms and meanings as well as grammatical rules and lexical choices requires significant re-interpretation. The concept of the norm itself should be rethought. It can be facilitated by corpus approaches.