[Corpora-List] What is corpora and what is not?

[Graham White]

I find myself a bit bemused by this discussion (though it has turned up 
some interesting thoughts) for the following reasons.

i) People are trying to find a definition of a term, whereas a good deal
of experience in disciplines such as corpus linguistics seems to show 
that a lot of terms do not have definitions in the sense that people are 
looking for (and that they are none the worse for that). Why do people 
not apply the insights of their own discipline to this enterprise?

ii) Apart from saying that a corpus is a collection of texts (which, as
everyone remarks, is not very illuminating), then it seems to come down 
to saying something about the purposes for which people collect and use 
corpora. But these purposes are extremely varied, corpora can be 
collected for one purpose and used for another, and so on. Corpus 
linguistics is, after all, an applied discipline, and the purposes very 
often come from the discipline applying the methods of corpus 
linguistics: it's very hard to survey the purposes of those disciplines,
and not for us to stipulate them.

I'm also tempted to speculate that attempts to define the term 
"analysis" might be similarly unfruitful.

On the other hand, it's been a fun discussion.

Graham

On 06/10/12 15:50, Trevor Jenkins wrote:
> On 6 Oct 2012, at 15:02, Laurence Anthony <anthony0122 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> ***Corpus = A collection of texts***
>>
>> I'm not sure that I'm very happy with this definition, either!
>
> I would change it to "corpus = text collected for the purpose of quantitative and/or qualitative analysis".
>
> Regards, Trevor.
>
> <>< Re: deemed!
>
>
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