Corpora: Chomsky and corpus linguistics

[ramesh at clg.bham.ac.uk]

Mike Maxwell writes:
If some large group of people all have
the same judgement about the acceptability of certain constructions, and
those constructions are rare, then how can one explain their consensus?

"Acceptability" here seems to be equivalent to "what is possible".
Corpus linguists are more interested in explaining "what is common
or frequent", which is closer to "what is probable", hence I suppose
the attraction of statistics. "What is possible" seems to require
a binary yes/no type of answer, "what is probable" suggests a
cline or spectrum. Language is a part of human behaviour, and
almost everything seems to be possible within human behaviour.
However, corpus linguists are happy to say "this type of (language)
behaviour is rare" because we have little or no evidence for it,
but we would not say "it is impossible". Human beings are creatures
of habit, there are many things we could do, but don't (or only
on rare occasions, in fun, in anger, in extremis). Corpus linguistics
offers a way of describing the things we *do* do regularly and frequently,
with greater confidence and reliability than by using introspection
alone.

Ramesh
P.S. re "natural" and "unnatural", see my earlier email with
corpus data on "eager to please".
BTW, "synthesized organic chemicals are not really organic":
isn't the distinction closer to "synthetic" vs "naturally occurring",
or would you claim that a laboratory exists within "nature", so
chemicals produced in it are "naturally occurring"?