Findings can be generalised to a larger population, and direct comparisons can be made between two corpora, so long as valid sampling and significance techniques have been used. Thus, quantitative analysis allows us to discover which phenomena are likely to be genuine reflections of the behaviour of a language or variety, and which are merely chance occurences. The more basic task of just looking at a single language variety allows one to get a precise picture of the frequency and rarity of particular phenomena, and thus their relative normality or abnomrality. However, the picture of the data which emerges from quantitative analysis is less rich than that obtained from qualitative analysis. An item either belongs to class x or it doesn't.
Quantatitive analysis is therefore an idealisation of the data in some cases.
Also, quantatitve analysis tends to sideline rare occurences. A recent trend From this brief discussion it can be appreciated that both qualitative and quantitative analyses have something to contribute to corpus study. There has been a recent move in social science towards multi-method approaches which tend to reject the narrow analytical paradigms in favour of the breadth of information which the use of more than one method may provide. Schmied demonstrates that corpus linguistics could benefit as much as any field from multi-method research.