[Corpora-List] Chomsky and computational linguistics

[Oliver Mason]

> And the goal is good, because we all do it, every day.

I would say the goal is pointless.  Language is not a fixed formal
mechanism, it's a dynamic and evolving system.  I'm guessing here, but
I'm pretty sure nobody in biology would care about listing all the
possible shapes in which a tree can grow.  So it's not a problem that
is relevant to understanding how language works.  Furthermore,
language is constantly changing, so as soon as you've created a
grammar than can generate all those sentence it's already out of date.
 A bit like counting the exact population of our planet.

However, other people might disagree, and it depends very much on what
you're looking for when analysing language.  I would argue that you
need a corpus to get a decent grammar, by which I mean one that
describes actual usage and hence allows you to make relevance
judgments.  If a grammar describes an obscure phenomenon in great
detail but neglects more common structures, then it's not that useful.
 And human intuition is good at neglecting routine usage in favour of
'interesting' and 'weird' things.

Also, corpora are not irreducibly complex.  We just haven't found the
right way forwards, as we're too focused on formal methods and
traditional grammar.  And I blame Chomsky for that, boo hiss.

Oliver

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