Corpus linguistics doesn't mean anything. It’s like saying suppose a physicist decides, suppose physics and chemistry decide that instead of relying on experiments, what they’re going to do is take videotapes of things happening in the world and they’ll collect huge videotapes of everything that’s happening and from that maybe they’ll come up with some generalizations or insights.
I'm all for experimental science but I did find it a bit amusing the way Chomsky appeals to its authority. From what I've seen a typical "experiment" in linguistics means the linguist coming up with a more or less convoluted sentence and introspecting to decide whether it's grammatical or not. You can easily guess what proper experimentalists in natural or social sciences would think of such a methodology. (By this I don't mean to say that grammaticality judgments are totally useless per se, just that the methods commonly used to obtain them don't meet the standards of proper experimental research.)
As to the use of corpus data in research on language, Chomsky's dismissal is hard to make sense of. So OK physicist don't typically record videos of things happening out there, fair enough. But even someone afflicted with acute physics envy should be able to see that there are respectable and highly successful branches of science which cannot and do not rely on experiments to obtain their data. In effect, scientist in those areas do analyze huge "videotapes" of stuff that happened to make generalizations and come up with theories about their domain of study. Obvious examples are paleontology, evolutionary biology or cosmology. You can't rerun the Big Bang to see what happens when you fiddle with such and such parameter. All we can ever hope to do is to watch those videos in the form of red-shifted light from receding galaxies, background radiation etc. And yet, we know way more about the history of the universe than about the workings of human language.
