[Corpora-List] little favour

[W. Louw]

Hello All

It strikes me that little mentalist favours can turn into a disservice to
scholarship. It was Gottlob Frege about 100 years ago who first cautioned us NOT
to (as Firth later said) 'fish in our own tank' for made up examples starting
from a single word. Frege's logic demands that there be both a function and an
argument. This latter 'argument' enabled him famously to state the difference
between the morning star and the evening star, notwithstanding the fact that
they refer to the same astral body. The answer lies in the collocates.

We would be a lot better off dropping something as manifestly weak as grammar
in favour of collocation, which is altogether more thorough at finding outer
limits computationally. The outer limits of SLIP will be found in its different
involvements in _Sachverhalten_ or Wittgensteinian 'states of affairs'. Once you
have all of these, you can establish the line of best fit for your SYMBOL.
Collocation is capable of re-assigning the categories of mere grammar. Meaning
is what we ought to be after, unless we have come to language study in order to
enjoy the solipsism of manipulating symbols. Geoffrey appears to be defending a
practice that I once used disparagingly in an article on semantic prosody and
that he insisted he be allowed to remove as a condition for reprinting the
article. Ramesh, to his credit, includes in his recent re-print of the article
my 'little favour' request to readers to come up with sentences involving the
form 'without feeling'.

Bill Louw

Head
English Department
University of Zimbabwe

_______________________________________________
Corpora mailing list
Corpora at uib.no
http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora