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

[Laurence Anthony]

On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 12:27 AM, Patrick Juola <juola at mathcs.duq.edu> wrote:
>> Hmm, many people have contributed. Are we all just being silly?
>
> Yes, bluntly.

OK. Sorry to be silly!


>> Can you give me an example of one of the "broad terms" that a
>> scientist (e.g. physicist) uses which is not defined?
>
> "Life."  (biology)  "Matter." (physics)  "Mind." (psychology)
> "Thought." (psychology, again)  "Illness."  (medicine)

Really. A very quick review of relevant sites gave me the following.
I'm sure I could get more authoritative definitions if I tried:

life (biology)
http://www.biology-online.org/dictionary/Life

matter (physics)
http://physics.about.com/od/glossary/g/Matter.htm

mind (psychology)
http://psychology.about.com/od/cindex/g/def_conscious.htm

thought(psychology)
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/consciousness-and-the-brain/201202/what-is-thought-0

illness (medicine)
http://www.merriam-webster.com/medlineplus/illness

The point is that definitions are certainly not a waste of time. In
medicine, for example, a doctor (researcher) does not use the terms
"life" and "death" in his/her work (research) as he/she would do in
non-critical general conversation. The question of whether something
is alive or dead in a research project is very important and depends
crucially on definitions. In my view, we should strive to adopt
similar rigor in our own use of terms.

Doug Roland wrote:
>It seems to me that the only reason to define what a corpus is is to be able to exclude something from being a corpus

As I explained earlier, the reason for defining terms is so that we
can communicate with others. Without a definition, how am I supposed
to know what you mean by the word "corpus" in the above sentence? Do
you mean "dog", "cat", "a collection of texts" ...? Without a shared
understanding of the words we use, we cannot communicate with each
other. Surely, us linguists should understand this point? No? A word
may have multiple meanings and in this case, each time the word is
used by a speaker, the listener will have to decode the word to
extract the meaning (in that context). Science works well because it
reduces this ambiguity by using a carefully defined set of words
(terms). When a doctor declares a patient "dead", it has a very
precise meaning. When NASA scientists look for "life" on other
planets, they too are using a very carefully defined term.

When we read a research paper and someone says they used *a corpus*,
are we sure we know what they mean?

Laurence.

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