<div dir="ltr">Angus has made an interesting suggestion. Still, this discussion seems to me to be tantamount to suggesting that, if we leave our nuclear family (or at least talking with those of our own generation!), we are doomed to fail at understanding what we will encounter. I'm an American from the Midwest (Toledo, Ohio, early teens in Nashville, TN, college in Boston, then on to Washington, D. C. and the world at large) and I find I can mostly understand almost all English speakers, discoursing on almost all subjects. I can even understand much of that subtle, understated humor Brits are so justly famous for! Or maybe I just unknowingly miss a lot of what is said to me (that would be my wife's interpretation). <div>
<br></div><div>Anyway, I do believe that we can can pretty well categorize genres with or without prolonged studies (and I don't mean to belittle such studies at all, but I do mean to underline the very real abilities of the layman to separate or categorize, at least to a large degree, that vast literature which we gather into corpora). I guess what I am saying is that we *can* understand one another, and if laymen can understand one another, I think that there is great hope that corpus linguistics will also be able, sooner or later, to muddle through all these problems we dream up for ourselves (and of course for the practical uses we hope our theoretical musings will lead to in the medium term).</div>
<div><br></div><div>Jim</div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br clear="all"><div>James L. Fidelholtz<br>Posgrado en Ciencias del Lenguaje<br>Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades<br>Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, MÉXICO</div>
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 7:33 PM, Angus Grieve-Smith <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:grvsmth@panix.com" target="_blank">grvsmth@panix.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><div class="im">
<div>On 1/26/2014 4:51 PM, Matías Guzmán
Naranjo wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div dir="ltr"><br>
<blockquote style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex" class="gmail_quote">Another
thing we can do is to put off the problem of finding a
representative sample of Language X and focus on a particular
genre or register, where there will be less variability.</blockquote>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>The problem is that we want to be able to generalized. It
is of little insight to say that construction X is more
frequent than construction Y in <<semi-guided interviews
conducted by profession linguists, where the test subjects
know they are being recorded>> for the 100 people you
picked. We would like to be able to say that those results are
representative of, say, spoken language in a particular city,
or at least a formal spoken register. Not being able to
generalize would mean that things like collocational, or
collostructional studies are meaningless for spoken corpora
because they would only apply to that particular set of texts.<br>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<br></div>
Right. Here's what I don't get: Why hasn't anyone followed even
a single speaker around, let alone a representative sample, to see
what proportion of registers and genres they're exposed to on a
daily basis? Or has this been done?<div class="im"><br>
<br>
<pre cols="72">--
-Angus B. Grieve-Smith
<a href="mailto:grvsmth@panix.com" target="_blank">grvsmth@panix.com</a>
</pre>
</div></div>
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