[Corpora-List] Re: Chomsky

[Shlomo Izre'el]

I don't have the original by Leech, but here is what I have in my files:
"Any natural corpus will be skewed. Some sentences won't occur because 
they are obvious, others because they are false, still others because 
they are impolite. The corpus, if natural, will be so wildly skewed 
that the description would be no more than a mere list."
(Chomsky in Leech, The State of the Art in Corpus Linguistics, 1991, p. 
8)
Shlomo Izre'el

On Oct 14, 2004, at 4:08 PM, Bob Knippen wrote:

>
>
> Mª Belén Díez Bedmar wrote:
>
>  > I'm looking for the exact bibliographical reference where we can 
> find
>  > Chomsky's idea that a corpus presents a language that is defective 
> or
>  > corrupted.
>
> To my knowledge, he never says any such thing.
>
> He does say, in several places (Syntactic Structures, 1957 comes to
> mind), that corpora do not provide the kind of information about
> linguistic competence that Linguistics ought to be after.
>
> In particular, he says that corpora do not provide information about
> what is ungrammmatical, and he says something to the effect that
> corpora, being finite, do not shed light on the infinite generative
> capacity of language.  (That is, a statistical model based on a
> particular corpus is not a model of the language in general).
>
> I very much doubt he wrote that a corpus presents a language that is
> defective or corrupted.
>
> Bob
>
>
> -- 
> Bob Knippen	  	    	    	
> Computer Science Department
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>
>
>
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_______________________________________________________
Shlomo Izre'el
Professor of Semitic Linguistics
Department of Hebrew and Semitic Languages
Webb Building #516
Tel Aviv University                      Home address:
POB 39040                                   Simtat Neve-Tsedek 7
IL-61390 Tel Aviv                        IL-65154 Tel Aviv
Israel                                              Israel
Tel. +972-3-640 5016                 Tel. +972-3-517 5341
Fax. +972-3-640 7031                Fax. +972-3-510 1867
        +972-3-640 9457
izreel at post.tau.ac.il
http://www.tau.ac.il/humanities/semitic/izreel.html

The Corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew:
http://www.tau.ac.il/humanities/semitic/maamad.html (Hebrew text)
http://www.tau.ac.il/humanities/semitic/cosih.html (English text)
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