[Corpora-List] A small favour

[Krishnamurthy, Ramesh]

Dear Ulf
Thank you for allaying my fears!

It just struck me, as some of you have remarked, that a primitive elicitation experiment might throw additional light on the valuable information I retrieved from my corpus data.

Indeed. My occasional ad-hoc elicitation of collocations has often demonstrated substantial variance between elicited data and corpus data.
I wonder if you will find the same with syntactic/valency features?
Best wishes
Ramesh

________________________________
From: Ulf Magnusson [mailto:mag.nusson at bredband.net]
Sent: 07 September 2007 15:17
To: Krishnamurthy, Ramesh
Cc: eslambx at langate.gsu.edu; m_mehta at teacher.com; grs2 at sussex.ac.uk; corpora at uib.no
Subject: SV: A small favour

Dear Ramesh, Amanda, Moneesha, Geoffrey and others on the list,
No offence! I'm grateful for the interest and kindness that my simple request met with and besides I'm happy it also created some comment on corpora and elicitation. I have indeed received a great number of suggestions from numerous scholars. I feel I have to write you all a short note already before I have sorted out the answers I got. Thank you Ramesh, for the time you spent on my little request. I have, in fact, been on the list for a couple years by now, and I am working with the BNC. It just struck me, as some of you have remarked, that a primitive elicitation experiment might throw additional light on the valuable information I retrieved from my corpus data.

I will be back on the list with information on the data you spent time on offering me. And, again, there are no hard feelings whatsoever on my part. After all, we all "seek the truth" don't we? There's no room for prestige here.
All the best
Ulf

-----Ursprungligt meddelande-----
Från: Krishnamurthy, Ramesh [mailto:r.krishnamurthy at aston.ac.uk]
Skickat: den 7 september 2007 15:46
Till: Geoffrey Sampson
Kopia: Ulf Magnusson; corpora at uib.no
Ämne: RE: A small favour


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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