Corpora: Out-of-print Corpus Linguistics books

[Geoffrey Sampson]

If a book has gone out of print, the publishing contract will normally
specify that the copyright reverts to the author, so he is free to publish
it again with a new publisher if it had only a small circulation first time
and has become much more significant later.  Of course this isn't the usual
fate for a book -- with most books, as their date of first publication
moves into the past, they become less relevant; but for books in that
special situation it is quite common for them to be reissued.  I don't really
see that happening for one of the early ICAME annual proceedings, though
(which is what the Aarts and Meijs volume was).

I find www.abebooks.com really excellent as a source of information about
holdings of secondhand bookshops worldwide.  But unfortunately, although
currently it lists two later volumes edited by Aarts & Meijs, it doesn't
list a copy of that 1984 one.  (I have a copy myself but I'm afraid I'm
not parting with it!)

Another thing which is very often done when a newish academic discipline
develops towards maturity is that someone compiles a book (Americans often
call them "readers") containing a collection of many of the "classic"
articles which have shaped the field -- an excellent example was, for
general linguistics, the Martin Joos volume _Readings in Linguistics_,
1957, which was what enabled many of us who first got involved with
linguistics in the 1960s to catch up the "story so far" and find out what
were the interesting issues that had emerged by that point.  I think it
would be an excellent idea for someone to do this for corpus linguistics
by now.  In fact, if no-one is doing so, I would be half inclined to suggest
such a venture to my own publisher.

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