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

[Geoffrey Williams]

Dear All,

A circular discussion seems to be going on.

Bill Louw and Wolfgang Teubert are obviously discussing corpus linguistics,
other are discussing either their own interpretation of it, or something
completely different. Cognitive linguistics seems to be in the totally different
class.

Corpora list is about corpora, so it seems obvious that we should have a very
wide community of users as corpora exist in many forms and for many reasons. I
am happy to follow all leads and much of the discussion on the list is very
fruitful. However, I also know that I am a corpus linguist, I do not do Natural
Language Processing, nor Cognitive Linguistics, not because I am not interested,
nor because I consider them irrelevant, but because I am primarily interested in
language in the corpus. To quote John Sinclair, I « Trust the Text ». Trusting
the Text is what corpus linguistics is all about. It is instructive to go back
to the writings of Firth who refuted all mentalism.

Other approaches have a lot to learn from corpus linguists. If they are prepared
to listen. The converse is also true, and we do listen. But that does not mean
the discipline should be watered down. Firth, Malinowski and Wittgenstein were
great inspirers. Interpreted by Sinclair, Tognini-Bonelli, Teubert, Hoey, Louw
and others a highly fruitful approach to language has been developed. It
deserves to be allowed to continue to develop without a takeover bid on the name
so as to slip in a wholly different paradigm.

However, saying that Cognitive linguist accepts corpus linguistics does sound
rather pretentious. I am glad they accept our existence, but saying so sounds a
bit like the so-called Unification Church that likes to takes bits from a
variety of religions whilst respecting the basic tenets of none.

Best

Geoffrey


-- 
Geoffrey Williams, MSc, PhD
Professeur en sciences du langage
Directeur du département d'ingénierie du document
Université de Bretagne Sud - Faculté LSHS
4 rue Jean Zay
BP 92116
56321 LORIENT CEDEX
FRANCE

Tél: 33 (0) 2 97 87 29 20

Bob, Chris, Wolfgang, et al.,

All of this argumentation seems hopelessly confused by different
assumptions about what a "cognitive" approach is supposed to be.

For the record, I suggest that everybody who is arguing about whether
a cognitive approach is consistent with a corpus-based approach look
at the papers that were presented at the founding meeting of the
Cognitive Science Society.  The early archives are available for
free download:

   http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/CSJarchive/1980v04/index.html

The charter for cognitive science was a very broad interdisciplinary
approach, and they explicitly tried to include all of the positions
that everybody has been arguing for and against in these recent emails.

Wolfgang's roughly Wittgensteinian approach is as solidly within
the mainstream of cognitive science as Chomsky's appeal to intuition.
Personally, I prefer Wittgenstein to Chomsky, but I wouldn't kick
anybody out of the party just because they had a different preference.

John Sowa



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Université de Bretagne sud                               http://www.univ-ubs.fr/

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