[Corpora-List] Chomsky and computationnel linguistics

[Oliver Mason]

Just a quick remark, which I feel summarises my main issue that I have
with non-empirical linguistics:

> ...  An example is the dialects of English that have
> subjectless for-to constructions, e.g. "I want for to go."  There have
> been several papers on this construction in this dialect, and IIRC, all
> the work was done on the basis of constructed examples, because there is
> very little corpus on this.

So you study a phenomenon based purely on made-up examples?  In other
words, I can invent my own dialect, make up some odd sentences, and
write papers about it (and presumably get them published in journals
on theoretical linguistics)?

This might sound a bit exaggerated, but I cannot really see how that
is different from studying language purely based on intuition.
There's a very fitting quote by John Sinclair about how botanists
don't study artificial flowers.  If we want to find out anything about
the true nature of language then we will need to study authentic
examples, not invented borderline sentences about farmers beating
donkeys and colourless ideas.

Oliver