Odp: Corpora: Chomsky and corpus linguistics

[Tadeusz Piotrowski]

I hope more people would like to know whether _Empirical Linguistics_ is
out? And who is the publisher?
Thank you.
Tadeusz Piotrowski
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----- Original Message -----
From: Geoffrey Sampson <geoffs at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
To: <corpora at hd.uib.no>
Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2001 11:30 AM
Subject: Corpora: Chomsky and corpus linguistics


>
>
> 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
> fax  +44 1273 671320
> web http://www.grsampson.net
>