[Corpora-List] American and British English spelling converter

[Mark P. Line]

Martin Wynne wrote:
> 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?


There may be a couple of reasons for that.

1. There was a discussion related to this some time back here, from which
I was forced to conclude that "corpus linguistics" (including its
representation on this list) is no longer populated by linguists, but by
computer scientists (as distinguished by such things as goals and places
of employment more than by education or experience).

Linguists -- especially corpus linguists, of course -- may be much
differently vested in corpora as data sources (especially those of us who
are reacting against pre-scientific, introspective methodologies) than
many computer scientists may be, for whom they may be just another block
in the dataflow chart.


2. This particular thread seems to be more of a chat than an instrument of
scientific progress. Although there's probably no good reason for that not
to occur from time to time, one factor in this case may be that many
Americans have been preoccupied with politics for the last ten days.


-- Mark

Mark P. Line
Polymathix
San Antonio, TX