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

[Christopher Tribble]

Dear Wolfgang,

I couldn't agree more, but couldn't have said it so well. I was this very
morning reflecting on John's chapter "New evidence, new priorities, new
attitudes" in Sinclair, J. (ed) (2004) How to use corpora in language
teaching, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.  His hypothesis #1: THE LEXICAL ITEM IS
BEST DESCRIBED MAXIMALLY, NOT MINIMALLY sum's up for me a lot of what is at
the centre of Bill Louw's concern.  It's certainly at the heart of the game
I'm interested in.

Thanks for the calm, rational contribution.

Best

Chris
--
IN LONDON TODAY
Dr Christopher Tribble
EMAIL	|| ctribble at clara.co.uk
WEB	|| www.ctribble.co.uk 
BLOG	|| http://ctribble.blogspot.com 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: corpora-bounces at uib.no [mailto:corpora-bounces at uib.no] 
> On Behalf Of Wolfgang Teubert
> Sent: 14 August 2008 11:33
> To: Stefan Th. Gries; corpora at uib.no
> Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Bootcamp: 'Quantitative Corpus 
> Linguistics withR'-- re Louw's endorsement
> 
>  
> 
> Dear All,
> 
> I find the interaction between Bill Louw and Stefan Gries on 
> this list so exciting that I cannot resist the temptation to 
> contribute to it. Of course Bill Louw gets it wrong by 
> expecting a bootcamp to be anything like a conference. The 
> corpus tells us that a boot camp is
> 
> another word for a military training camp which was used 
> during World War II and many other wars
> 
> a very strict, highly structured facility with staff that act 
> as drill instructors
> 
> more like a review that prepares you for an exam.
> 
> Dagmar S. Divjak's and Stefan Gries' boot camp is, as I see 
> it, not about discussing corpus linguistics, but rather tells 
> participants
> 
> how to generate frequency lists;
> 
> how to search for words and patterns;
> 
> how to handle corpora and perform corpus-linguistic searches 
> that typical corpus software does not support;
> 
> how to carry out basic statistical evaluations of corpus data 
> (significance tests and statistical graphs).
> 
> Gries claims that statistics clearly plays a subordinate role 
> in this syllabus, but also that R-based software tools will 
> be made available that allow to easily perform many of the 
> above operations. The title of the event is: "Quantitative 
> Corpus Linguistics with R." The provider of this software 
> tells us: "R is a free software environment for statistical 
> computing and graphics." (http://www.r-project.org/)
> 
> For R-software, it does no matter what kind of strings of 
> information bit are processed. It could be language, but it 
> could also be DNA sequences or the ciphers behind the "3." in 
> the number pi. To me it seems that much of what will be 
> presented at the camp is relatively application-free. 
> Language is just one of many possible applications. What is 
> not discussed is what a morpheme is, what makes a sentence a 
> sentence, or how we can measure language acquisition. What is 
> not mentioned is meaning.
> 
> But then we have to remember that Stefan Gries wears at least 
> two hats. The journal he co-edits bears the name Corpus 
> Linguistics and Linguistic Theory. The only language theory 
> that Gries accepts is cognitive linguistics. His homepage 
> leaves us in no doubt. Meaning, for Gries, is a theoretical 
> and therefore a cognitive concept. It plays no role in his 
> version of corpus linguistics.
> 
> Old-fashioned corpus linguists like myself have to accept 
> that the label corpus linguistics has, over the last decade, 
> been hijacked by theoretical linguists of all feathers. What 
> used to be and still is for some of us a radically different, 
> a new way to look at language, has been foreshortened to a 
> bunch of methods, a toolbox to "search for words and 
> patterns." Its role is to provide empirical data that will 
> then be interpreted from the theoretical platform of 
> cognitive linguistics. Corpus linguists are not innocent of 
> this trend. At home in applied linguistics, they have often 
> shied away from formulating the fundamental difference 
> between the two approaches: For cognitive linguists, meaning 
> is in the individual, monadic minds of speakers and hearers; 
> for corpus linguists, meaning is in the discourse (or the 
> corpus, as a sample thereof). 
> 
> For Bill Louw, the inspirational  theoretician of my version 
> of corpus linguistics, collocation, and certainly  not 
> statistics, is at the very heart of meaning. It is how 
> meaning configures itself within a text and within the 
> discourse. It relates a phrase we find in a text to the 
> discourse at large. It allows us to investigate meaning 
> through intertextual links and through paraphrase. It does 
> not supply us with a hypothetical model of the meaning of a 
> phrase, as cognitive linguistics does. Rather it presents the 
> evidence of the meaning itself. It is then up to the 
> interpretive community to make sense of it. Language is 
> symbolic. Meaning has to be negotiated. It is irreducible to 
> neurons firing in our brains. 
> 
> Cognitive linguistics tells Stefan Gries what a morpheme, a 
> word, a phrase or a pattern is. This, then, is his input into 
> the toolbox that he and many others now call corpus 
> linguistics. Corpus linguists still don't know what a 
> morpheme, a word, a phrase or a pattern is. That is why they 
> always insist on discussing collocation. But they know that 
> words change their meaning. There would be no innovation 
> without the re-interpretation of what is there. Stefan Gries' 
> brand of corpus linguistics may well be our brave new world. 
> It is, however, not John Sinclair's corpus linguistics.
> 
>  
> 
> Wolfgang Teubert
> 
> 
> 
>  
> 
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> 
> 


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