In watching this debate as a bit of an outsider, a question comes to mind
that I haven't seen addressed . . . must MIT's contribution come in the
form of some concrete theory that directly changes the way corpus/applied
linguistics is done? It seems to me that their primary contribution may
be more intangible than that; that the discussions and countless books
and papers that come out of Boston have subtly (and apparently unknown to
many) changed the way we think about linguistics and spurred on the
empirical pursuits in which we are currently engaged. I cannot speak
about MIT's direct contributions to efforts in statisical processing of
language etc. but I think all would be hard put to claim that MIT has had
no impact on the field of linguistics. I would suggest that that impact
has at least indirectly had a tremendous impact on corpus linguistics,
and that we would be foolish to discount it outright simply because we do
not see its direct implications.
To paraphrase a man who was reporting on a keynote address by John
Leggett of Texas A&M, as accademics we take a rather uncivilized approach
to our research. We split up into small nomadic camps. On those rare
occasions that we meet up with some other camp, we spend most of our time
trying to kill each other. We might do well to start sending more
runners back and forth between our camps. There may be alot that we
Athenians can learn from the MIT Spartans even if it doesn't apply
directly to our current efforts.
Neal Audenaert
aggiemedic01@yahoo.com
Oh, and about the birds. I wonder if we would have thought about flying
if all the creatures we knew of walked about on the ground. As I recall,
the Wright brothers were avid bird watchers, and yes, they did directly
aply some of what they learned from the birds.
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