[Corpora-List] Google searches as linguistic evidence

[Ramesh Krishnamurthy]

>Quantitative needs to be tempered with qualitative research.

Or... the quantitative results need to be interpreted...


At 17:53 07/12/2006, Alison Duguid wrote:
>Looks like a case of  shifting or wobbly priming to me, as Michael 
>Hoey has pointed  out education has a key role in  priming and the 
>problem might be caused by doubt in a situation when fears about 
>correctness are uppermost because shifting identities are at work. 
>The questioner is really asking someone who is perceived to be a 
>native speaker of a
>variety (academic/correct) in which he felt he was not a native, 
>what would be the acceptable version.
>Also look how many hits you get for 'nucular', and then look again 
>at the co-texts and contexts. Quantitative needs to be tempered with 
>qualitative research.
>
>
>Geoffrey Sampson wrote:
>
>>An amazing experience I had a few years ago was being asked in all
>>seriousness by one of my part-time researchers whether "a bad egg" or
>>"an bad egg" was correct.  With another part of his time he worked for a
>>company alongside another man who had to do some documentation and
>>insisted that the correct form was "an bad egg".  So far as I could make
>>out, this other man (who, like my researcher, was as I understood it a
>>native speaker) thought he had learned a rule that "a" v. "an" depends
>>on whether the following noun begins with a vowel, and this explicit
>>rule overrode in his mind what must surely have been a large weight of
>>experience implying that it is not the following noun, but the
>>immediately-following word, that matters.  The third party was quite
>>sure that only "an bad egg" would do in writing; my researcher was
>>dubious, but felt he needed my professorial authority to contradict his
>>colleague.  This seemed to me very striking counter-evidence against the
>>idea that native speakers "know" the rules of their language.
>>Comparable misunderstandings of the a/an rule might perhaps explain
>>sporadic cases of "an w..." written by people who would surely _say_ "a
>>w..." when they were speaking spontaneously, without thinking about
>>language issues.
>>
>>Geoffrey Sampson
>>
>>............................................................
>>     Prof. Geoffrey Sampson  MA PhD MBCS CITP ILTM
>>
>>     author of "The 'Language Instinct' Debate"
>>
>>     Department of Informatics, University of Sussex
>>     Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, England
>>
>>     www.grsampson.net     +44 1273 678525
>>............................................................
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>

Ramesh Krishnamurthy

Lecturer in English Studies, School of Languages and Social Sciences, 
Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK
[Room NX08, North Wing of Main Building] ; Tel: +44 (0)121-204-3812 ; 
Fax: +44 (0)121-204-3766
http://www.aston.ac.uk/lss/staff/krishnamurthyr.jsp

Project Leader, ACORN (Aston Corpus Network): http://corpus.aston.ac.uk/ 
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