Meaning of “linguistic phenomenon” [closed]

A corpus (pl. corpora) is a collection of spoken or written texts to be used for linguistic analysis and based on a specific set of design criteria influenced by its purpose and scope. There are various, and sometimes conflicting, definitions in the relevant literature (...) as to what exactly constitutes a corpus, but for our purposes, we’ll adopt the relatively simple and straightforward one given above. This basically means that any collection of texts that has been systematically assembled in order to investigate one or more linguistic phenomena can be termed a corpus, even if it may only contain a handful of classroom transcripts, interviews, or plays.

Practical Corpus Linguistics: An Introduction to Corpus-Based Language Analysis

What is the definition of linguistic phenomenon in the context of a linguistic corpus? I don't know what they mean by a phenomenon.

Solution 1:

I know of no better definition of the word "phenomenon" than this one.

From The shorter Oxford Dictionary

phenomenon 1 An act or event that appears or is perceived by one of the senses or by the mind; especially one whose cause or explanation is in question.

This means that about anything in linguistics can be called a phenomenon; the fact that you use "a" before words beginning with a consonant and "an" if the first consonnant is a vowel can be called a phenomenon; the fact that it takes twenty six letters in order to represent all the sounds of English is a phenomenon and the fact that you must place the subject before the verb in normal constructions is another. However, people tend to use the word when they are discussing a question about a particular fact, which they then refer to as "this phenomenon", such a phenomenon, etc.