[Corpora-List] Chomsky

[Davis, Boyd]

An interview with Chomsky from earlier this year -- in which he talks about this issue -  is in the first number of the new Journal of Intercultural Pragmatics. Look on the left side of the page at this URL http://www.degruyter.de/rs/384_7078_ENU_h.htm
   The article will be free for the next week or 10 days

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-corpora at lists.uib.no [mailto:owner-corpora at lists.uib.no] On Behalf Of Diana Maynard
Sent: Sunday, November 14, 2004 10:44 AM
To: corpora at uib.no
Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Chomsky

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