[Corpora-List] Bootcamp: 'Quantitative Corpus Linguistics with R' -- re Louw's endorsement

[Stefan Th. Gries]

We are grateful for Louw's assessment of our syllabus as "exciting".
While we agree that collocation is an important topic in corpus
linguistics,

- we don't know how many years of experience of teaching collocation
extraction with scripting languages Louw has, but according to our
experience this may well be too tough a topic for a class of only a
few days with participants from different backgrounds (the book on
which this bootcamp is based of course has a section on collocations);
- there are many other methods out there, and many researchers
including the instructors manage to eke out a living with very few or
even no publications involving collocations proper let alone semantic
prosody and should decide for themselves what they need and what they
don't;
- in that connection, while we of course defer to his respected
authority when it comes to judging what is "fatally flawed" and "21st
century", not "20th century", corpus linguistics, we should like to
again point out that, since what we offer is a bootcamp, not a
conference, at least the latter distinction does not even apply here.

In addition, we are amazed at the coincidence that his mail criticizes
us mainly for the (purely didactically-motivated) decision to leave
out the one topic for a publication on which he is known. It is
disturbing that someone would actually write to thousands of people to
try to discourage them from attending an event he knows very little
about other than that his favorite topic is not included. But then,
life moves in mysterious ways ...

STG (for Dagmar S. Divjak and myself)
--
Stefan Th. Gries
-----------------------------------------------
University of California, Santa Barbara
http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/stgries
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