[Corpora-List] “Corpus and Cognition” at CL 2007: call for expressions of interest

[Gaëtanelle Gilquin]

Planned colloquium at Corpus Linguistics 2007 (Birmingham, UK, July 27-30 2007)

Corpus and Cognition: The relation between 
natural and experimental language data


MOTIVATION

While the usefulness of corpora for the 
description of language cannot be denied, it must 
also be recognised that they are not the only 
sources for language data. Corpora show how 
people use language in authentic environments, or 
what is likely to occur in language, but they do 
not make it possible to answer questions having 
to do with, say, grammaticality or language 
processing, or how, if at all, language is 
structured in the mind. Hence the suggestion, 
made by several researchers (e.g. Kennedy 1998), 
to combine corpus data with other types of linguistic evidence.

One particularly interesting combination is that 
between corpus analyses and experimental 
techniques (elicitation, lexical decision, 
magnitude estimation, eye movement research, 
reaction time measures, etc.). While the former 
make it possible to study “properties of the 
linguistic output of language users” (Sandra 
1995: 592), the latter give access to “properties 
of the mental processes and structures underlying 
language production and comprehension” (ibid.), 
such as cognitive salience or readability. 
Bringing together the two approaches, therefore, 
offers a more holistic view of language.

Depending on the phenomenon investigated and the 
types of data used (e.g. speech vs. writing, 
sentence production vs. self-paced reading), one 
may find that the natural and experimental 
language data converge (cf. Gries et al. 2005) 
or, on the contrary, that they produce different 
results (cf. Roland & Jurafsky 2002). We believe 
that, by examining such relations more closely, 
we will learn more about the specificities of 
each type of data and will thus be able to make 
informed choices about how the two can fruitfully 
be combined, in domains such as descriptive 
linguistics, sociolinguistics or foreign language teaching.

- Gries, S.Th., B. Hampe & D. Schönefeld. 2005. 
“Converging evidence: Bringing together 
experimental and corpus data on the association 
of verbs and constructions”. Cognitive Linguistics 16.4: 635-676.
- Kennedy, G. 1998. An Introduction to Corpus 
Linguistics. London & New York: Longman.
- Roland, R. & D. Jurafsky. 2002. “Verb sense and 
verb subcategorization probabilities”. In S. 
Stevenson & P. Merlo (eds) The Lexical Basis of 
Sentence Processing: Formal, Computational, and 
Experimental Issues (pp. 325-346). Amsterdam & 
Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
- Sandra, D. 1995. “Experimentation”. In J. 
Verschueren, J.-O. Östman, J. Blommaert and C. 
Bulcaen (eds) Handbook of Pragmatics. Manual (pp. 
590-595). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.


CALL FOR EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST

If you are interested in presenting a paper on 
the relation between natural and experimental 
language data, please send a short abstract (up 
to 200 words) to 
<mailto:gilquin at lige.ucl.ac.be>gilquin at lige.ucl.ac.be 
as soon as possible, and in any case by DECEMBER 
1 2006. We will then prepare the official 
colloquium proposal to be submitted for review to 
the Corpus Linguistics conference organising committee.


“CORPUS AND COGNITION” COLLOQUIUM ORGANISERS

Gaetanelle Gilquin (FNRS – University of Louvain)
Terry Shortall (University of Birmingham)


CORPUS LINGUISTICS 2007 WEBSITE

<http://www.corpus.bham.ac.uk/conference2007/index.htm>http://www.corpus.bham.ac.uk/conference2007/index.htm


****************************
Gaëtanelle Gilquin
Postdoctoral Researcher FNRS
Centre for English Corpus Linguistics
Université catholique de Louvain
Collège Erasme
Place Blaise Pascal 1
B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve
Belgium
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