Cognitive linguistics has an honourable tradition of paying respect to naturally occurring language data and there have been fruitful interactions between corpus data and aspects of linguistic structure and meaning. More recently, dialect data and sociolinguistic data collection methods/theoretical concepts have started to generate interest. There has also been an increase in several kinds of experimental work. However, not all linguistic data is simply naturally occurring or derived from experiments with statistically robust samples of speakers.

The Lexical Approach develops many of the fundamental principles avanced by proponents of Communicative Approaches . The most important difference is the increased understanding of nature of lexis in natutrally occurring langugae, and its potential contribution to langaue pedagogy