[Corpora-List] Chomsky and computationnel linguistics

[Ramesh Krishnamurthy]

Dear Hanane Mahjoubi

It seems odd to link "corpora" and "Chomsky" in the same sentence.

In a recent article...
>Joszef Andor
>The master and his performance: An interview with Noam Chomsky
>Intercultural Pragmatics 1-1 (2004), 93–111

...Chomsky said:
>(p 97) Corpus linguistics doesn’t mean anything. It’s like saying suppose
>a physicist decides, suppose physics and chemistry decide that instead
>of relying on experiments, what they’re going to do is take videotapes
>of things happening in the world and they’ll collect huge videotapes
>of everything that’s happening and from that maybe they’ll come up with
>some generalizations or insights.

and in answer to the interviewer's question:
>(p 99) Think of the occurrence of ‘‘Can you . . 
>.’’ or, ‘‘Could you . . .’’ rather
>than ‘‘Are you able to . . .’’ in polite 
>requests in given communicative situations
>(a domain studied extensively by speech act theorists). Such chunks
>of linguistic expressions can be traced by the researcher via the application
>of corpus linguistic methods. It is from a corpus that one can identify
>their frequency and trace shifts in their meaning and use. Would you attribute
>significance to such data in your approach to linguistic analysis and
>description?

>(p 99) People who work seriously in this particular area do not rely
>on corpus linguistics. They may begin by looking at facts about frequency
>and shifts in frequency and so on, but if they want to move on to some
>understanding of what’s happening they will very quickly, and in fact do,
>shift to the experimental framework. Where you design situations, you
>enquire into how people will act in those situations. You design them
>within a framework of theoretical inquiry which has already suggested
>that these are likely to be important questions and I want the answers to
>them. But that’s not corpus linguistics.

Best
Ramesh


At 08:49 28/06/2007, hanane.mahjoubi at voila.fr wrote:

>Dear corpora members,
>
>In the field of computationnel linguistics, i'm 
>working about dialogues using the 
>transformationnel theory of Chomsky and i need 
>collabaration with corpora memebers working or 
>interested in syntaxic studies. three languages 
>are taken into consideration: arabic, french and english.
>
>i hope to get contacted with members working or 
>interested in syntaxic studies especially the 
>application of the chomskeynne theory.
>
>thanks in advance.

Ramesh Krishnamurthy
Lecturer in English Studies, School of Languages 
and Social Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK
Tel: +44 (0)121-204-3812 ; Fax: +44 
(0)121-204-3766 [Room NX08, 10th Floor, North Wing of Main Building]
http://www.aston.ac.uk/lss/staff/krishnamurthyr.jsp
Project Leader, ACORN (Aston Corpus Network): http://corpus.aston.ac.uk/ 
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