[Corpora-List] Boot Camp (continued)

[W. Louw]

Hello All,

You know how it is with fires that you think have been extinguished... there is
always someone in the human chain of water buckets who mistakenly picks up and
hands on a bucket of kerosine.

Joybrato finds this bucket _en passant_. She writes:

Both Louw's work on
semantic prosody and Gries's research on collostructions are - in my
view at least - very valuable contributions to (corpus) linguistics, and
both concepts help us immensely in understanding essential facts about
language in use.

I agree that we need to be understanding, but the word that would stick in the
craw here for Firth and Malinowski would be the word CONCEPTS. Malinowski
(writing before computers were a force to be reckoned with) said that we need to
see language as a 'mode of action _in rebus_' rather than as the 'countersign of
thought'. Firth writes (and this started Sinclair's investigations into
collocation that were published by Ramesh and Wolfgang as the OSTI Report)
'Collocation has nothing to do with the ideas meaning of words...one meaning of
the word night is its collocability with dark' Corpus linguists ought to see
this as CO-SELECTION. Concepts can at last be dispensed with altogether. John
Sinclair says that semantic prosody (Chapter 14 of _Reading Concordances_) is
hidden meaning. Hidden from what or whom? From intuition. That is the answer.
Concepts are phlogiston,  because Sinclair is right: semantic prosody can only
be found, seen and appreciated by computational means (see Siobhan Chapman's
wonderful new book on empiricism p169). If this is true, then collocation is
INSTRUMENTATION for finding these hidden meanings that are so empirically
prominent. Yet they are often intuitively invisible in spite of this huge
empiricism: a sort of Potteresque invisibility cloak. They may even form the
backdrop for the computer to find structure within the exceptions to the
prosody, viz irony and insincerity. Syntax has only one function left in this:
it allows us to check the simplicity or complexity of fakes. Co-select TRUTH and
RECONCILIATION and you only get one collocate: COMMISSION... put there by the
spin doctors to look like a cherished and distinguished legal institution of
'mass justice', but in reality a WAIVER commisson (Louw, 2003). We can
colloborate, but one side has to drop the mind and concentrate upon the image
that society imprints into the plastecine of language. Which side is better
placed for doing that? Without an ill grace?

Bill

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