Corpora: Chomsky and corpus linguistics

[T Murphy]

I am curious what people think about Robert De Beaugrande's use of corpus linguistics in New Foundations for a Science of Text and Discourse (Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1997)to critique one of Chomsky's most famous sentences as part of a wider argument in favour of corpus linguistics:

"65. As a corpus gets larger, it does not simply show us the same data multiplied out, eg., each item being ten times as frequent in a corpus ten times as large. Instead, the larger corpus both turns up fresh data that did not appear at all in the smaller ones and displays the previous data in steadily finer delicacy for the range and frequency of the combinations. Hosts of regularities emerge that escaped notice in smaller data sets, and would elude unguided intuition and introspection. [...] Instead of coverage, convergence, and consensus decreasing when natural language data get rewritten into a formal notation, they are now increasing when data get treated in their naturally occurring formats.
66. Conversely, the corpus highlights the improbable and unnatural quality of invented data like 'John is eager to please'. Typical contexts of real discourse call for less simple-minded and peremptory utterances. For example, all three instances of 'eager to please' in the Bank of English have a Direcct Object Target and a more inteeresting Subject Agent than the legendary 'John'. eg., the 'government' keen to 'please' powerful forces such as 'wealth' and 'the Church'
[18] <a government offical who is eager to please the wealth goddess>
[19] <the Sandinstas. The government is eager to please the church>" (44)

For myself, Chomsky's comment about corpus lingustics not existing seems to be a logical response from someone whose whole enterprise would be undermined by the widespread adoption of real data as a mediator of conflicting linguistic judgements.


Dr. Terry Murphy
Dept. of English
Yonsei University
Seoul, Korea<br clear=all><hr>Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at <a href="http://www.hotmail.com">http://www.hotmail.com</a>.<br></p>
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