Corpora: Chomsky and corpus linguistics

[Geoffrey Sampson]

I find Amanda Schiffrin's approach to these issues extremely congenial
(generative v. corpus-based approaches being like top-down v. bottom-up
approaches to the same problem, which with luck will eventually meet
in the middle).  I think there are signs that the overall discipline is
developing in a way that makes hers an increasingly accurate description
of the situation -- I very much hope so.

The problem which has been aired in earlier postings is that, regrettably,
in the past, and to a considerable extent even today, things have not
been like that.  Many generative linguists have made it clear that they
not only were working at a distance from the empirical data but saw
empirical data as in principle largely irrelevant.  Concepts such as
"competence" v. "performance" (and more recent generative terminology
which I have not kept up with) were used to shield generative accounts
from any possibility of being tested against observation.  Mandy writes
that theories which cannot be backed up by "real" evidence should be
"discarded without a second thought", to which three hearty cheers; but
there has been a strong current within academic linguistics of "If
performance data seem incompatible with our theory, discard the data without
a second thought".  (I realize that these are large statements which I
myself am making here without giving chapter and verse -- I do the latter
in parts of my recent book _Emprical Linguistics_, apologies for the plug.)

The attitude I am describing has been so widely and strongly asserted during
the period of my own career that the effort of disagreeing with it has
left me feeling slightly psychologically marked, as perhaps is apparent
from this posting!  If Amanda's comments imply that a new wave of people
are coming forward for whom being empirical just isn't an "issue" any
more, that is really good news.

Geoffrey Sampson


G.R. Sampson, Professor of Natural Language Computing

School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, GB

e-mail geoffs at cogs.susx.ac.uk
tel. +44 1273 678525
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