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

[Hardie, Andrew]

I will make only a short contribution to this discussion --

It bears mentioning that, if - as Wolfgang Teubert suggests - Stefan
Gries considers CL to be "a bunch of methods, a toolbox", then he is far
from alone in this. As a corpus linguist I consider myself primarily a
methodologist and CL primarily a methodology, to be applied to whatever
theory seems most appropriate for the task at hand - cognitive or
typological or literary or political or whatever. Though I won't speak
for anyone else I know I am not alone in this. This tradition of
CL-as-method is, contrary to what WT suggests, equally as venerable as
the CL-as-theory. It is unnecessarily divisive to suggest that
"old-fashioned" corpus linguists must subscribe to CL-as-theory, or that
the CL-as-method view is in some way a degeneration or a hijacking of
CL-as-theory.

Although I consider myself a part of the method-oriented tradition, my
research has often been informed and inspired by researchers (too
numerous to mention, but of course including Sinclair) in the other
tradition. It has always been my impression that there is room, in what
is after all a widening field, for both conceptualisations of CL, and
that despite differing ideas of what the field is about we can co-exist
and collaborate in reasonable harmony.

best regards,

Andrew.

Andrew Hardie
Linguistics & English Language
Bowland College
Lancaster University
Lancaster LA1 4YT
United Kingdom
 
www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/staff/hardie


-----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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