<div>Emiliano Guevara wrote that we should "...try to find a balance between ... logorrheic impulses and<br>the aims of a public information space: some people make interesting questions, others give pertinent answers...."</div>
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<div>Without denying that some of us (who, through modesty, will remain nameless) *do* have logorrheic impulses (a seventh-grade companion once stymied me by accusing me of "sesquipedalian verbiage" -- sorry, Emiliano), it is quite clear that there is a full and fine gradient between what many see as 'interesting questions ... and pertinent answers', on the one hand, and 'logorrheic impulses' (hereinafter 'LI') on the other. Personally, I find two good things about this list: </div>
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<div>1) it has more good discussions than any other list I can think of (I would miss only LinguistNetwork more if I didn't have email, and that only because of the full listing of meetings and books that it has); and</div>
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<div>2) it is by far the most helpful list I know of when people (novices or advanced corpus analysts alike) have questions about corpus mechanics, etc. This, I believe, is because: a) most of the best practitioners in Corpus Linguistics are on this list; and</div>
<div> b) for whatever reason, Corpus Linguists [or corpus practitioners from other fields] seem to be more helpful than run-of-the-mill list members of other lists. This may be because most of us (if I can presumptuously include myself here) learned how to manipulate corpora pretty much the hard way: by trial and error, so we tend to be easy-going with novices and with others who may have taken a different road to corpora than we did.</div>
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<div>For these reasons, I'm proud to be a member of this list, and generally read all contributions that are not obviously way out of the areas that I am interested in. And I'm rarely sorry I did.</div>
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<div>To get back to the LI issue: we do need to recognize that Emiliano has decent reasons for saying what he does. Still, many interesting comments occur during 'logorrheic' divagations. And if we can accept that most of us are intelligent (and I think we can), then wading through a little logorrhea is a small price to pay for the occasional nuggets one finds therein. Likewise, as I already intimated above, I personally find very little that I would really classify as logorrhea. When I do run across some, it becomes easy to lump such contributions with those out of my area of interest and just skip them.</div>
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<div>Jim<br><br> </div>
<div><span class="gmail_quote">On 3/29/08, <b class="gmail_sendername">Dr DJ Hatch</b> <<a href="mailto:drdjhatch@gmail.com">drdjhatch@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</span>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">When I was an undergrad we were taught, if I remember correctly, that what<br>is innate is (a) universal grammar.<br>
...<br>Oh, I forgot to reply to the query on 'prescriptive grammar'. It's merely<br>the grammar taught by language teachers and compiled by the grammarians who<br>serve that industry. Such persons have led me to the belief that ALL<br>
languages are over-grammaticalised by those who give us prescriptive<br>grammars, and then by ourselves through our acceptance and use of the stuff.<br>...<br>A very sensible grammarian once suggested in my hearing that a language<br>
needs either strict word order (plus prepositions, etc) or strict word<br>ending rules (so without prepositions). This seems a rather persuasive<br>hypothesis. But are there any languages out there which conform to it?<br>
If not, was that grammarian wrong, or do we actually have too much grammar?<br><br>... it seems to me that the pivotal issue remains <br>which parts of language are grammatical and which not? Ie, how much of<br>'meaning' if any is covered/explained by grammar. This sounds a very<br>
amateurish question. But it seems to be a not unimportant one. Over the<br>years a number of my colleagues have suggested that one problem here is the<br>poverty of sub-disciplines such as (traditional) semantics, which seemed to<br>
be very influential in Cricean 'pragmatics'.<br><br>I really think it is unclear to many (in and around linguistics) as to where<br>grammar ends and where some other stuff begins (that is, the stuff and the<br>sub-discipline responsible for 'keeping it in order').<br>
...<br></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>James L. Fidelholtz<br>Posgrado en Ciencias del Lenguaje<br>Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y<br> Humanidades<br>Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de<br> Puebla, MÉXICO