On 27 Apr 2001 ramesh@clg.bham.ac.uk wrote:
[snip]
>Corpus linguists are more interested in explaining "what is common
>or frequent", which is closer to "what is probable", hence I suppose
>the attraction of statistics. "What is possible" seems to require
>a binary yes/no type of answer, "what is probable" suggests a
>cline or spectrum. Language is a part of human behaviour, and
>almost everything seems to be possible within human behaviour.
>However, corpus linguists are happy to say "this type of (language)
>behaviour is rare" because we have little or no evidence for it,
>but we would not say "it is impossible".
[a little more snip]
Hmmm. Maybe I'm not cut out to be a 'real' corpus linguist, if
this is true, since my principal interest is in relatively 'rare'
phenomena. Or maybe it's an indication that I am basically a
descriptive linguist (I've even been known to do basic Chomskyan
armchair linguistics). However, I still have trouble really feeling the
much-discussed opposition, or even really much tension aside from a few
people's comments, between corpus linguistics and (Chomskyan or
non-) descriptive linguistics. Basically, it seems to me that only an
idiot practitioner of descriptive linguistics would a priori exclude
evidence from corpus analysis. How one analyzes the evidence, of
course, can produce good or bad linguistics; from where I sit, this
depends more on the analyst's insights than on their theory, assuming
they have some sort of reasonable theory.
Have a nice weekend.
Jim
-- James L. Fidelholtz e-mail: jfidel@siu.buap.mx Posgrado en Ciencias del Lenguaje tel.: +(52-2)229-5500 x5705 Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades fax: +(01-2) 229-5681 Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, MÉXICO
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