> doesn't this beautifully illustrate the important difference between doing
> Corpus Linguistics in order to generalise about "the language" (or even
> "language") and a text-oriented CL where the idea is to find out about a
> text or set of texts!
...
> but those (like me) seeking text-generalisations
> are playing a different game I think, so the prizes are quite different.
and Oliver Mason said
> Even something as `simple' as a word frequency list is full of pitfalls and
> leads back to one of the fundamental problems of corpus linguistics: how
> valid are the statements we make about our findings in general? Do we need
> a representative corpus, and how does it look like? What are we looking at
> in the first place? The dilemma (in my humble opinion) is that nobody in the
> world has exactly the same amount of exposure to newspaper language, spoken
> language of different style levels etc., so that it is impossible to define
> what `representative' is in an definitive way. Whose language are we
> modeling, then? Any answers to this question would be greatly appreciated...
-- I agree wholeheartedly with both, but the question then is, how
do we move on towards answering some of Oliver's questions?
Step Number One is to get hold of a vocabulary for talking about
which corpora are like which others. At the moment we can't say
anything much more intelligent than "I use this corpus, you use that
one, and they're different." How different? In what ways? Like which others?
Tony Rose and I published a first stab at EMNLP this year in Granada,
and all being well, there'll be a workshop on "comparing corpora" or
similar some time next year. Watch this space.
Adam Kilgarriff
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Adam Kilgarriff
Senior Research Fellow tel: (44) 1273 642919
Information Technology Research Institute (44) 1273 642900
University of Brighton fax: (44) 1273 642908
Lewes Road
Brighton BN2 4GJ email: Adam.Kilgarriff@itri.bton.ac.uk
UK http://www.itri.bton.ac.uk/~Adam.Kilgarriff
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