This paper attempts to reconstruct the positions of a trend that recommends approaches based on corpora as founding a new linguistics. Two sets of arguments have been put forward : critical arguments, which target Chomskyan linguistics and the way data are tackled, and positive arguments, which deal with the possibility of discovering new facts, improving analyses, taking into account the fields and domains that were previously considered as ignored. Although some of the criticisms actually point out some difficulties in linguistics research, the use of corpora does not fundamentally change the researcher’s position.