[Corpora-List] Is a complete grammar possible (beyond thecorpus itself)?

[Rob Freeman]

On 9/10/07, Geoffrey Sampson <grs2 at sussex.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> I was interested in John Sowa's comment that people in 1970 might have
> seen NLs as formal systems, "but nobody seriously believes it today".  I
> wonder if that is really so?  I'm sure no-one calling himself or herself
> a corpus linguist believes it, but we are still probably a minority of
> all linguists interested in grammar.  My impression is that there remain
> a great number of people out there who would describe themselves as
> generative linguists and who do assume that NLs are formal systems
> defined by finite sets of clearcut rules -- this assumption might be
> something that makes many of them feel vaguely uncomfortable so that
> they avoid thinking about it too deeply, as a clergyman might repress
> doubts about the Virgin Birth or the like, but that is very different
> from consciously rejecting the idea.  Am I out of date in supposing that
> a large proportion of linguists remain generativists in that sense?


I think we _all_ remain covert generativists in the main, even corpus
linguists.

What does it mean when we label a tree-bank, or tag a corpus? What theory is
behind the idea of "parts-of-speech"?

What has changed is that we have stopped doing syntax. Sure, we've gained a
lot of insight about the importance of lexicon and phraseology. That is not
to be sniffed at. But when we try to do syntax what comes out is still
mostly generativism, without the rigour.

-Rob
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