Counting things

[Mills, Carl (MILLSCR)]

 Having spent three decades counting things, I want to second Wallace
Chafe's "last reservation."  Of course, there is always going to be a need
for the intervention of human minds.  But those minds tend to work best on
inputs that do not originate within themselves.  There is a real world, and
it is, in some important sense, out there.  Corpus linguistics offers the
possibility of starting with something other than "Can you say S?" or worse
"Can I say S?"and I don't think that is a small achievement.

Carl

-----Original Message-----
From: Wallace Chafe
To: FUNKNET at LISTSERV.RICE.EDU

Just one last reservation.  Corpora make it easy to count things and
come
up with interesting findings regarding the frequency of this or that.
But
knowing exactly what you're counting may not be such a simple matter,
and
it's easy to come up with "operational definitions" that turn out in the
end to be spurious.  What I'm trying to say is that there's much of
importance to learn from examining real language, but it shouldn't
seduce
us into thinking we can just crank out analyses mechanically.
Understanding the nature of language is always going to require the
intervention of perceptive human minds.

Wally Chafe
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