[Corpora-List] Chomsky and computationnel linguistics

[Oliver Mason]

Dominic wrote: "Botanists don't study artificial flowers, but I'm sure
molecular biologists do. So the position "artificial examples have no
place in science" is hard to credit."

Ah, but there is a difference between a carefully set up experiment,
and making up things.  And I'm sure not even molecular biologists
would study man-made plastic flowers.  What could they possibly find
out about them that tells them something about real flowers?

Lou wrote: "But let's not forget that the stuff that comes out of
linguist's mouths, even the mouths of
theoretical linguists, is also language!"

Here I would argue that it's only language when it is used as such, ie
talking to somebody.  I'm sure there are lots of sentences uttered by
linguists in the various corpora we keep looking at, and there is
nothing wrong with that.  But can I study aerodynamics by sitting in
the proverbial armchair and thinking up a plane?  It's different if I
build a model and study how it behaves in repeatable experiments.

I guess it all boils down to repeatability.  My main criticism with
the invented examples of rare events is that you cannot challenge
them, because you can't repeat the analysis with your own data.

Oliver