Re: Corpora: Historical background of Corpus Linguistics

From: Ngoni Chipere (n.chipere@reading.ac.uk)
Date: Thu Apr 18 2002 - 15:44:44 MET DST

  • Next message: Alberto Lavelli: "Corpora: Research position at ITC-irst in Trento (Italy)"

    Seeing as the history of corpus linguistics is such a hot topic today,
    perhaps I could interest some of you in an apparently forgotten chapter of
    this history.

    I've just completed a draft of a book chapter which looks at historial
    corpus linguistics from a psycholinguistic angle. The chapter discusses the
    ideas underlying the different characterisations of linguistic knowledge by
    Chomsky (1957) ('knowledge of language is an innate formal system' ) versus
    Hockett (1955) ('knowledge of language is a corpus systematisation in the
    form of a finite state grammar').

    The chapter also reviews the experimental evidence for each view and finds
    more experimental support for the finite state view, though there were some
    surprises for both sides of the argument.

    I'd be interested in any feedback.

    *********************************************************
    Dr Ngoni Chipere
    Research Fellow
    School of Education, University of Reading
    Bulmershe Court, Earley, Reading, RG6 1HY, UK
    tel 0118 9875123 ext 4943

    This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Apr 18 2002 - 15:43:04 MET DST