Mike<div><br></div><div>It's all about getting the right corpus. It's almost always harder to get informal than formal text types. The spoken-conversation part of the BNC is a great role-model.</div><div><br></div>
<div>A delight of the web is that it has lots of informal language in it, specially in blogs and similar, so, with a little application, we can gather text of informal types. Our work on web corpus collection always has that in mind.</div>
<div><br></div><div>> saying that corpus linguistics was exactly the wrong way to build a dictionary</div><div><br></div><div>That's just a counsel of failure. What does she propose doing instead? Guess (sorry, introspect - mustn't be rude)? Copy existing? Ask her friends?</div>
<div><br></div><div>adam<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 15 December 2010 23:40, Mike Maxwell <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:maxwell@umiacs.umd.edu">maxwell@umiacs.umd.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
I was talking this afternoon with a lexicographer who is working on western Panjabi (the variety--or varieties--spoken in Pakistan, and written in a Perso-Arabic script). She was saying that corpus linguistics was exactly the wrong way to build a dictionary of colloquial Panjabi, because of a somewhat diglossic situation: the written/ standardized language is not what most people speak.<br>
<br>
There are of course many diglossic language situations around the world, particularly in situations where a single "language" has been written for centuries or millenia. I put "language" in scare quotes because of course all languages will have changed over that period of time, to the point of non-mutual intelligibility (if you can find any 2000 year old speakers :-)).<br>
<br>
At any rate, this certainly matters if you're trying to do dictionaries--or any other study of the spoken or colloquial language, or non-standard dialects. I don't recall seeing much discussion of the issues of doing corpus linguistics in diglossic languages, the following being one exception:<br>
@article{fonseca2003radical,<br>
title={{On the radical difference between the subject personal pronouns in written and spoken European French}},<br>
author={Fonseca-Greber, B. and Waugh, L.R.},<br>
journal={Language and Computers},<br>
volume={46},<br>
number={1},<br>
pages={225--240},<br>
issn={0921-5034},<br>
year={2003},<br>
publisher={Rodopi}<br>
}<br>
They resort to some small corpora of transcribed spoken French, and remark that they know about some usages that are not attested in these corpora.<br>
-- <br>
Mike Maxwell<br>
<a href="mailto:maxwell@umiacs.umd.edu" target="_blank">maxwell@umiacs.umd.edu</a><br>
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