[Corpora-List] little favour

[Santos Diana]

I meant that, if you are asked to come up with 6 made-up sentences
illustrating the verb slip one year after, you are going to come up with
6 different examples. (I have no proof of this, though :-) I suggest
that this is tried empirically...)

So, you cannot replicate your experiment and get the same sentences,
while if you ask that of a corpus you (or another researcher) would get
the same answer. I tried to point out this as one advantage of having
corpora and not relying on made-up sentences by a (quite) unknown
population.

Of course, I am aware that once you _collected_ those 6 sentences from
many people and create a corpus of made-up sentences, then you fix them
and can "repeat"/"replicate" your experiments. 

But while one knows that considerable work has been put in designing the
BNC (and one knows what kinds of speakers and what kinds of texts it
represents) -- and so you might think of creating a new/similar BNC
later -- it is hard to know what kind of mood and what kind of person
answered those 6 sentences, which is going to make it very unlikely that
you will be able to replicate this new "corpus".

This is what I meant by the sentence below, sorry for the bad English.
Diana

> -----Original Message-----
> From: corpora-bounces at uib.no [mailto:corpora-bounces at uib.no] 
> On Behalf Of Mike Maxwell
> Sent: 9. september 2007 17:08
> To: corpora at uib.no
> Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] little favour
> 
> Santos Diana wrote:
> > Elicited made-up sentences are probably unrepeatable
> 
> Can you explain what you mean by this?
> -- 
> 	Mike Maxwell
> 	maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu
> 	"Theorists...have merely to lock themselves in a room
> 	with a blackboard and coffee maker to conduct their business."
> 	--Bruce A. Schumm, Deep Down Things
> 
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