Corpora: Chomsky and corpus linguistics

[Mike Maxwell]

Ramesh writes:

>"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.

But that's the point of introspective grammatical judgements: they are binary, and *not* everything is possible.  (OK, I know they're not absolutely binary; some violations of grammatical principles seem worse than others, e.g. strong vs. weak crossover.)  

Putting this differently, there really are things that are *not* possible sentences in English, even though we sometimes know immediately what they would mean if they were grammatical.  "Whose did you find book?", "What are you afraid that happened?", "Who do you wonder whether will go?" etc.  And there are things that we know aren't English, unless we twiddle the grammar a bit.  My favorite example is the sentence from Catch-22, "They disappeared him."  As one of the characters says in the novel says, it's not English, but...

>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.

True, but a description =\= an explanation.  Generative linguistics is trying to find an explanation.  Whether you believe they have (or ever will) is of course another question; but at least by your (Ramesh's) description, corpus linguistics isn't even trying to find an explanation (unless you believe that our brains are HMMs or something).

      Mike Maxwell
      Summer Institute of Linguistics
      Mike_Maxwell at sil.org