Corpora: Historical background of Corpus Linguistics

[Ngoni Chipere]

Seeing as the history of corpus linguistics is such a hot topic today,
perhaps I could interest some of you in an apparently forgotten chapter of
this history.

I've just completed a draft of a book chapter which looks at historial
corpus linguistics from a psycholinguistic angle. The chapter discusses the
ideas underlying the different characterisations of linguistic knowledge by
Chomsky (1957) ('knowledge of language is an innate formal system' ) versus
Hockett (1955) ('knowledge of language is a corpus systematisation in the
form of a finite state grammar').

The chapter also reviews the experimental evidence for each view and finds
more experimental support for the finite state view, though there were some
surprises for both sides of the argument.

I'd be interested in any feedback.


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Dr Ngoni Chipere
Research Fellow
School of Education, University of Reading
Bulmershe Court, Earley, Reading, RG6 1HY, UK
tel 0118 9875123 ext 4943