[Corpora-List] A small favour

[Krishnamurthy, Ramesh]

Dear Professor Magnusson, Geoffrey, and all on the list



1. I'm really sorry if I sounded harsh, and apologize unreservedly.

I tried very hard to word my email carefully:


Dear Professor Magnusson
Please forgive me, but it seems strange to post an elicitation request on corpora-list.



2. The last thing I wanted to do was to scare anyone away

from using corpora. I was trying to do the opposite, by

providing some corpus examples myself and offering transitivity analyses.



3. The questions I asked are of genuine interest to me:

a) what purposes can elicitation serve that corpora cannot?

(and you Geoffrey have made one suggestion yourself: to compare

introspection with performance)

b)'spontaneous' (like 'authentic') can be contextualized in different ways; I thought

it might be useful to discuss the idea of spontaneity in the context of introspection

c) what is current psycholinguistic opinion on our degree of grammar-consciousness

while speaking?

d) how do we incorporate phrasal verbs into grammar systems?

(and how reliable are current parsers in identifying phrasal verbs?)

e) if transitivity is binary, where does 'ergativity'

(by which I mean 'I stopped the car. The car stopped.')

fit in? Or am I confusing syntax and semantics?



Many apologies again for any offence caused.



Best

Ramesh



-----Original Message-----
From: Geoffrey Sampson [mailto:grs2 at sussex.ac.uk]
Sent: 07 September 2007 13:13
To: Krishnamurthy, Ramesh
Cc: Ulf Magnusson; corpora at uib.no
Subject: A small favour



I thought Ramesh's response to a harmless-seeming request seemed a touch

harsh.  I had taken it that Ulf Magnusson might well be interested in

comparing the actual usage of SLIP as revealed by corpora to what

native-speaker linguists imagine the usage is (and I gave him a few

examples I dreamed up, as evidence for the latter).  It would be a pity

to scare off newcomers to the corpus-linguistics world!



Geoffrey





............................................................

     Prof. Geoffrey Sampson  MA PhD MBCS CITP FHEA



     author of "The 'Language Instinct' Debate"



     Department of Informatics, University of Sussex

     Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QJ, England



     www.grsampson.net     +44 1273 678525

............................................................


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