18.1380, Disc: New: Database and/or Wiki on Linguistic Evidence?

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LINGUIST List: Vol-18-1380. Mon May 07 2007. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 18.1380, Disc: New:  Database and/or Wiki on Linguistic Evidence?

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1)
Date: 05-May-2007
From: James Myers < lngmyers at ccu.edu.tw >
Subject: Database and/or Wiki on Linguistic Evidence?

 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Mon, 07 May 2007 15:09:46
From: James Myers < lngmyers at ccu.edu.tw >
Subject: Database and/or Wiki on Linguistic Evidence? 
 


There seems to be a rapidly growing interest in expanding the range of
empirical data sources for testing linguistic hypotheses, with books and
special issues and conferences in this general area becoming more and more
common. For a conference that we recently held ourselves here in Taiwan, I
threw together an arbitrary list of references and links:

http://www.ccunix.ccu.edu.tw/~lngproc/IWGElinkse.htm

But it seems to me that there should be a more ambitious, well-organized
attempt to provide a Web-based portal to this kind of information. This
might include a searchable paper archive, perhaps using the Ashing software:

http://software.auf.net/ashing/

... and/or a wiki, with advice on experimental design and statistics, links
to corpora and software, and suchlike stuff.

I was thinking about starting such a resource myself, but I'm not sure our
server could handle the traffic, and anyway this kind of thing requires an
active community (not to mention people who actually know how to write and
maintain server-side software).

The main difficulty with such a project would be drawing the line between
''empirical'' linguistics and ''ordinary'' linguistics, since of course no
sharp line exists. But that's what discussions are for. 


Linguistic Field(s): Discipline of Linguistics
                     General Linguistics





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