Data is king. In linguistics as well as in any other discipline, no serious claim can be made without solid data. And surely the revolution of Big Data hails a new dawn for linguistics research too: the computer-assisted ability to compile humongous corpora, crunch inordinately vast amounts of data and watch previously unseen patterns emerge has some magical appeal.
Yet, big or not, data and its mathematical exploitation isn’t everything. I was reminded of this by two recent developments in language study.