[Corpora-List] Chomsky and computationnel linguistics

[Lou's Laptop]

Oliver Mason wrote:
>
> 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.
>
I have every sympathy with this point of view. But let's not forget that 
the stuff that comes out of linguist's mouths, even the mouths of 
theoretical linguists, is also language!

Appeals to "authenticity" as the sole criterion in language, as in so 
many other domains, sometimes turn out to have a nasty normative agenda 
behind them. In what way are the imagined sentences of the armchair 
linguist less "authentic" than the imagined sentences of the novelist?