Corpora: Sloppy emails

[ramesh at clg.bham.ac.uk]

I apologize for not responding earlier to a discussion
which I seem to have unwittingly originated, but I have been
out of the country for a few days, running a corpus workshop.
I will make my comments *brief*, so as not to antagonize
the School of Brevity!

My original intention was just to make a plea on behalf
of non-expert speakers of English, people who have
problems with their computer system, people in a hurry, etc.,
who may not always express themselves "perfectly" in emails.

Geoffrey Sampson wrote: (Mon Apr 09 10:18:55 2001)
> With due respect to Ramesh, I can't see this myself.
> To me, sloppily-expressed e-mails are just selfishness.
Surely not always. I have mentioned several categories
of emailers above who might be excused. Recidivists who
do not appear to have any excuse lose out in the end,
because people take less note of their contributions.
I trust in karma!

Geoffrey Sampson wrote: (Tue Apr 10 15:11:32 2001)
> If someone had time to spend just "chatting" when they
> were nominally at work, it seems to me they would be
> rather under-employed.
This comment seems unnecessarily censorious.
Do we not have coffee breaks?
Surely it is a matter of degree, not a right/wrong issue.

> An exception, I do recognize, would be when a particular pair of
> correspondents had established a mutual relationship which might
> involve chatty messages -- then it's obviously up to them how
> they choose to communicate with each other.
I probably over-generalized in my original email. Of course I take
more care with emails to this list than I do to friends.
However, email does seem to have a more informal tone than formal
letters. Lists like this serve both as academic conferences and
coffee-break chats between colleagues. Really inappropriate
postings usually get an appropriate response (I recall a pungent
but very amusing riposte to someone trying to sell old ACL journals
by auction recently). The School of Levity has earned its place.

Bruce Lambert (Tue Apr 10 17:29:19 2001), Oliver Mason
(Wed Apr 11 10:30:37 2001) and others were right to make
the point that more care should be taken over public emails
than emails between friends.

Tony Mcenery (Wed Apr 11 10:04:36 2001) said:
> I will do my best to focus on substance rather than style
which I applaud.
But I take issue with him when he says:
>  the snob plural 'corpora'
a) This was the only plural form I was exposed to when I entered
this field in 1983, and I have therefore used it ever since. I
had no idea it was regarded by anyone as "snobbish".
b) This list is called "corpora-list". Isn't that some indication
that this is a consensus form, at least on this list? :--)
c) The Bank of English corpus (418m words) has:
70 examples of "corpora" (admittedly mainly from conversations
between linguists or lexicographers, but one or two examples from
several written sources, British, American, newspapers, magazines
and so on.
3 examples of "corpuses" (from 2 linguistics conversations)
0 examples of "corpi"

Oops, I see that I have forgotten to close a bracket 3 lines ago...

The comments on languages with diacritics sadden me.
I agree with the writer who said that surely computer technology
should be able to allow all of us to communicate - with ease -
in any language. English may be dominant, but should not become
exclusive.

Ramesh Krishnamurthy