Corpora: Chomsky and corpus linguistics

[Michael Barlow]

On Mon, 9 Apr 2001, Mike Maxwell wrote:

>
> All of this to say, there need not be any direct (meaning 'simple',
> 'straightforward') connection between performance and competence.

No, there need not be. But now we are in what I think of as the reasonable
position where you are defending the premises of a generative research
paradigm and I am defending the premises of (one version of) a corpus
linguistics research paradigm. Thus we have moved on from the
theoretician/practitioner and scientist/engineer labels attached to
generative/corpus linguists.

Perhaps this debate has focussed too much on North American approaches and
on 20th century structuralism.  Structuralism has served linguists well
and we have got tremendous mileage out of it, but it is a new century
and we need a radically new approach to move forward.

Michael
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Michael Barlow,      Department of Linguistics,       Rice University
barlow at rice.edu				      www.ruf.rice.edu/~barlow
Athelstan barlow at athel.com  www.athel.com (U.S.) www.athelstan.com (UK)