Corpora: "must have" lists

[Graeme Kennedy]

Geoff,
I hope you and Anne will follow up with a publisher your idea of a reader.
As regards the initial choice you mentioned for your list, I think the
article you may be  referring to was by Leech and Fallon in the ICAME
Journal, 1992,16, 29 - 50. ("Computer Corpora -  What do they tell us about
culture.")  I always get my MA classes to read it and it is always a hit.
With best wishes,
Graeme

At 17:10 19/06/2001 +0100, Geoffrey Sampson wrote:
>
>Lou suggests organizing a "reader" of classic articles in corpus linguistics
>as an electronic corpus.  Hmm ...
>
>I feel a bit sceptical about that for two reasons.  One is that I doubt that
>the primary purpose (of helping newcomers "read themselves in" to the field)
>would be achieved well by an electronic corpus of articles -- people like
>reading off paper bound into journals and books, not off the screen -- and
>publishers would be less enthusiastic about publishing a collection
>(and copyright permissions might be harder to get) if the material were also
>being made available electronically.  (I know there are exceptions, such
>as the _State of the Art in Human Lg Technologies_ book available both on
>the Web and from CUP -- but I think they will always be exceptions rather
>than the norm.)
>
>Also, I am not sure that Lou's second purpose, of providing a source from
>which one could monitor the development of terms of art in the field, would
>really be achieved all that well by a collection of the N classic readings
>in the history of corpus ling.  Lou knows a lot more about lexicography
>than I do, but it seems to me that the limited number of items one would
>most want to encourage newcomers to read would not necessarily coincide with
>the texts that best exemplified the development of terminology -- for that,
>would a larger bulk of less-exciting items not be more informative?
>
>But I certainly agree with Lou that it would be interesting to see how far
>people's "must have" lists coincided.  Since the note of mine to which
>Lou is responding, Anne Wichmann and I have discussed whether we might
>actually propose a collection like this to a publisher -- I'm not sure
>whether either of us is yet clear that we want to commit ourselves to the
>effort, but we are clear that one desirable thing would be to use the
>Corpora List to get people to propose their personal Top N lists.  I had
>thought we would probably wait till we actually got to the stage of
>putting a synopsis in front of a publisher, if we ever do -- but I suppose
>since Lou has raised the idea, people might want to have fun over the
>summer putting together such lists!  Mine would include
>the article from _ICAME News_ by ??Stig Johansson and Geoff Leech?? about
>significant vocabulary differences between British and American English,
>and the one from a book edited by Nelleke Oostdijk, by ?Ken
>Church and Bill Gale?, "What is wrong with adding one?" -- but I haven't
>started seriously working out a proper list.
>
>Geoff
>
>
>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
>

----------
Graeme D. Kennedy
Professor of Applied Linguistics
School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies
Victoria University of Wellington
P O Box 600
Wellington, NEW ZEALAND
Phone: (64) (04) 4635627or (64) (04) 4721000 ext. 5627
Fax: (64) (04) 4635604
email: graeme.kennedy at vuw.ac.nz