[Corpora-List] Chomsky

[Bob Knippen]

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


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