[Corpora-List] American and British English spelling converter

[Harold Somers]

> 
> I find it fascinating that as soon as we find a linguistic 
> topic which sparks the interest of everyone here, the 
> discussion suddenly makes hardly any reference to corpora. 
> Why are suddenly anecdotes, intuitions, folk theories and 
> made-up examples preferable to consulting corpora?
> 
> It's a serious question. It seems to me reasonable to bring 
> in these other factors and pieces of evidence to inform a 
> discussion about corpus linguistics, but why is almost no-one 
> consulting a corpus, or consulting research papers based on 
> corpora? Lack of resources? Lack of tools? 
> Don't think that use of corpora is appropriate for this question?
> 

It's true that a lot of the responses have been of an anecdotal nature,
but a few have also referred to corpora, especially I notice to REFUTE
anecdotal claims. This seems to be the heritage of corpus linguistics,
which I daresay is regrettable.