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

[Reinhard Rapp]

Although the thread is already a bit long, let me come up with another 
aspect concerning the usefulness of definitions. Like any other common word 
of a language, the word "corpus" is already defined by its uses. (In the 
Firthian sense: "you shall know a word by the company it keeps".)

What we usually call a "definition" is in effect a short summary of typical 
(i.e. frequent) uses. But by summarizing we will inevitably loose most of 
the more fine grained information concerning the word. Therefore, such a 
definition will probably not be very useful to the expert (it adds only one 
more context to the many contexts the expert knows already), but it may be 
helpful to someone new to a field (or a language learner) who has not often 
perceived the word (or a particular sense of it).

If we come up with a definition and if, subsequently, this definition is not 
used by others, then it will not have much of an impact. For example, in 
this thread the term "video corpus" has been used. Whether or not people 
will accept that a corpus can consist of videos will probably crucially 
depend on how often the term "video corpus" will be used in the future. My 
guess is that people are likely to use the term "video corpus" if it can be 
used in many similar contexts as "text corpus" (e.g. "build a video corpus", 
"representative video corpus", etc.), i.e. if it is a paradigmatic 
association (sharing many properties).

Reinhard


-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- 
From: Patrick Juola
Sent: Monday, October 08, 2012 5:27 PM
Cc: corpora at uib.no
Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] What is corpora and what is not?

On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 11:07 AM, Laurence Anthony <anthony0122 at gmail.com> 
wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 11:44 PM, Patrick Juola <juola at mathcs.duq.edu> 
> wrote:
>> Actually, that's a pretty good illustration of why definitions are
>> unimportant and why this whole discussion is rather silly.
>
> You say "definitions are unimportant" and this discussion is "silly".
>
> Hmm, many people have contributed. Are we all just being silly?

Yes, bluntly.


>
>> There's a reason that scientists don't define the meanings of most of
>> the broad terms they use.  It wastes time on unproductive inquiry.
>
> 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)

Even "sleep" is tricky to define, as any anaesthesiologist will tell
you.    The question of exactly where and how a patient loses
consciousness is of course, key to this field of medicine -- but our
simple idea of a thin bright definitional line between "sleep" and
"waking" (or "conscious" and "unconscious") is tremendously
oversimplified.   There are dozens of processes involved, many of
which interact, not all of which are turned off at the same rate by
the same process or drug.  Trying to make a definition stretch to
cover all these phenomenon is not just silly, but stupid.   Instead
the practicing scientists focus on defining specialist vocabulary to
describe the specific phenomena they're interested in, just as corpus
linguists will talk about "historical corpora" (which presumably is a
corpus that focuses on historical variance, possibly at the expense of
other aspects).

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