Corpora: Collaborative effort

[Philip Resnik]

>   Suppose I were to post on the CORPORA list a word plus its definition
>   as taken from some good dictionary. Then I invite all and any
>   CORPORA list members to select from whatever corpora they may have
>   accessible to them one or more instances of an authentic context
>   in which the word is used with the given sense. I invite anyone to
>   email their selected examples to an email address which simply
>   files the examples away under the heading of the word/sense combination.
>   Easy, eh? How many examples might I expect to get? One hundred? Or
>   just ten? Or maybe 1,000? I think I might get a hundred or more.

Neat idea.  Raises questions of quality control and avoiding
duplicates, of course.  And you certainly should ask people to cite
the *sources* of their examples if at all possible.

It strikes me that things have come full circle in a way -- I recently
read

  Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman : A Tale of Murder,
    Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary,
    Harpercollins, 1998. (ISBN 0060175966),

in which I learned about the collection of word citations done by the
original OED lexicographers to *create* dictionary senses.  (I highly
recommend the book!) Now you're starting with the dictionary senses
and trying to accumulate instances.

Do let us know how your little pilot study on "fierce" turns out...

Best,

  Philip
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  Philip Resnik, Assistant Professor
  Department of Linguistics and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies

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