RE: Corpora: history of corpora

Christopher Tribble (ctribble@lanka.ccom.lk)
Fri, 4 Dec 1998 17:45:16 +0530

I notice an interesting comment on the meaning of the neologism "water up".

Surely Oliver used it in the sense intended - ie in arguing for a more
specific definition? Maybe the confusion arises because (unexpectedly)
this particular multi-word verb stands in paradigmatic relationship with
"dress up" and "tart up" rather than with the more obvious combinations of
"water"?

>
> 'Water up?' If anything, Oliver's original point seemed to argue for a
> specific interpretation of the term 'corpus' as against a looser one.

To add my own two penn'orth, is it really necessary to require a corpus to
have its own retrieval system? One of the real problems for many of us
with BNC is that the designers have tried to lock potential users into
their idea of what's important - providing us willy-nilly with an engine
that can't generate wordlists or search on tags alone....

Isn't it perhaps better to think of a corpus as a just collection of texts,
no more and no less?

Bestest

Chris Tribble

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