[Corpora-List] history of corpus linguistics

[Adam Kilgarriff]

As well as Corpus Linguistics's "own" history (Brown, LOB, ICAME,
anti-Chomsky), two external influences need mentioning:

	* lexicography - different agenda but responsible for lots of the
actual corpus-building work and innovation, at least in UK.  BNC was
lexicography-led.  
	* NLP / computational linguistics, which has come into the field
like a schoolyard bully, forcing everything that's not computational into
submission, collusion or the margins.  For history of this aspect, Church
and Mercer's Intro to the 1993 Sp Issue of Computational linguistics on
using large corpora (19 (1)) is great reading

Adam


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-corpora at lists.uib.no [mailto:owner-corpora at lists.uib.no] On
Behalf Of Geoffrey Williams
Sent: 06 January 2007 08:29
To: Florian Petran
Cc: CORPORA at uib.no
Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] history of corpus linguistics

As far as I know there is no complete and unexpurgated history as yet, b 
ut I very good background is given from in Graeme Kennedy's introduction 
to corpus linguistics. I recently wrote an explanation of the origins 
contextualist corpus linguistics for a French audience, who often seem 
to confuse corpus linguistics and NLP, and also literary analysis with 
quantitive methods. In looking for information John Sinclair pointed me 
in the direction of a very interesting article by Léon (2005) which 
kicks into touch the boring litany of Chomskyan influence on linguistics 
this side of the pond. Given that John was a prime mover in the 
development of corpus studies in the UK, the interview of with Wolfgang 
Teubert in the introduction the recent republication of the OSTI report 
by Ramesh Krishnamurthy (Sinclair et al 2004) is worth reading, as is 
the report itself as it is a good lesson in humility with so much done 
to lay the foundations of current methodology. Another source in the 
same ilk is Sampson and McCarthy (2004) as this has texts from the pre 
computer period as well as some foundational texts that are no longer 
easily available.

Hope this helps

Best

Geoffrey

*Kennedy G.*1998. /An introduction to corpus linguistics./ London & New 
York: Longman

*Léon, J*. 2005. ‘Claimed and unclaimed sources of /Corpus 
Linguistics’/. /Henry Sweet Society Bulletin/. N°44. pp.36-50.

*G. Sampson and D. McCarthy (eds). */Corpus Linguistics: Readings// in a 
widening discipline/. London and New York: Continuum, 2004

*Sinclair J. McH., Jones S., Daley R.* 2004. /English Collocation 
Studies: The OSTI Report/. Londres - New York : Continuum.

Geoffrey Williams
Professeur des Universités en Sciences du Langage
Université de Bretagne Sud, Lorient, France
geoffrey.williams at univ-ubs.fr

Florian Petran a écrit :

> McEnery/Wilson : Corpus Linguistics. An introduction, Edinburgh: EUP
> 2005 have a chapter on the topic.
>
> Harris: The linguistics wars, Oxford: OUP 1993
> covers the debate with Chomsky, though does not deal explicitly with
> corpus linguistics.
>
> 2007/1/5, Ronald P. Reck <rreck at rrecktek.com>:
>
>> Can someone recommend sources for a history of corpus linguistics, and
>> more specifically string frequency analysis?
>>
>> Right now I have:
>>
>> Hockney, Susan, 2000. Electronic Texts in the Humanities Oxford
>> University Press
>>
>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>>
>
>
>