[Corpora-List] Chomsky

[Diana Maynard]

Bob Knippen wrote:

> Mª Belén Díez Bedmar wrote:
>
>  > I'm looking for the exact bibliographical reference where we can find
>  > Chomsky's idea that a corpus presents a language that is defective or
>  > corrupted.
>
> To my knowledge, he never says any such thing.
>
> He does say, in several places (Syntactic Structures, 1957 comes to
> mind), that corpora do not provide the kind of information about
> linguistic competence that Linguistics ought to be after.
>
> In particular, he says that corpora do not provide information about
> what is ungrammmatical, and he says something to the effect that
> corpora, being finite, do not shed light on the infinite generative
> capacity of language.  (That is, a statistical model based on a
> particular corpus is not a model of the language in general).
>
> I very much doubt he wrote that a corpus presents a language that is
> defective or corrupted.
>
> Bob

Perhaps it would be better rephrased as "Chomsky's idea that a corpus presents
a *view of* a language that is defective or corrupted".
Regards
Diana