[Corpora-List] Bootcamp: Quantitative Linguistics

[W. Louw]

Dear list members

I apologise for raising apparently momentous issues in relation to what the
organisers themselves now see as a trivially small and limited operation. The
reason I did so was the apparently mistaken belief on my part that a leading
scholar who is about to give in September a keynote address in Granada on the
life and contribution to scholarship of John Sinclair MIGHT have left
collocation out (as Sinclair perceived it) as an oversight.

On the matter of relevance in the 21st century of what is on the published
agenda for the event, I adhere to my position. Collocation is instrumentation
for meaning. It is data-assisted and data-driven reading and leaving it out or
confining it to mere statistics will cause the event to have a dusty and dated
feel to it. Counting must be related to contextual meaning. The act cannot
worship itself unsupported by the social dimension. I thought that this was
trite law since the time of Frege and assumed that we were in the run-up to a
Firthian/Malinowskian conference in Granada and that, in Householder's terms, a
hocus pocus rather than a God's truth dimension was finally entering NLP. Was I
mistaken?

Enrol for a course in statistics and concepts if you wish. We live in a free
world, I hope.

Bill Louw

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