RE: Corpora: history of corpora

Oliver Mason (oliver@clg.bham.ac.uk)
Fri, 4 Dec 1998 17:25:36 +0000

> 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....

Well, I never said I wanted to define a corpus by this criterion. It was
just an observation on what makes some corpora distinct from archives.

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

I would still want to stick to my point that it's a purposeful collection,
with linguistic criteria in mind, not any old collection of random textual
material.

Have a good weekend everybody,
Oliver

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