[Corpora-List] history of corpus linguistics

[Ute Römer]

Dear Ronald and others, 

There is a piece by Wolfgang Teubert entitled "A brief history of corpus
linguistics" which you may find useful in Halliday et al.'s (2004)
Lexicology and Corpus Linguistics textbook (part of ch. 3; published with
Continuum). And then Elena Tognini Bonelli and John Sinclair have a relevant
article in Elsevier's Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd edition,
2005/6?, ed-in-chief Keith Brown). 

Happy New Year and best wishes... Ute


************************************************************
 
Dr. Ute Römer
English Department
Leibniz University of Hanover
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30167 Hannover
Germany
 
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Conference website: "Exploring the Lexis-Grammar Interface" (ELeGI, 5-7
October 2006) http://www.elegi-2006.com

 

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-corpora at lists.uib.no [mailto:owner-corpora at lists.uib.no] On
Behalf Of Adam Kilgarriff
Sent: Saturday, January 06, 2007 11:11 AM
To: 'Geoffrey Williams'; 'Florian Petran'
Cc: CORPORA at uib.no
Subject: RE: [Corpora-List] history of corpus linguistics

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.
>>
>>
>
>
>