[Corpora-List] Boot Camp (Continued...)

[John F. Sowa]

Lou,

I am happy to hear Halliday mentioned in this discussion:

 > Yes, in part of my work I draw on insights... and from the kinds
 > of simple counting that Halliday recommended as far back 1973 in
 > his seminal study of Golding's "The Inheritors" (Halliday, M.A.K.,
 > (1973) Explorations in the Functions of Language, London: Edward
 > Arnold).

I would recommend a more recent book, in which Halliday summarized
and synthesized his many years of research on language:

    Halliday, M.A.K. & Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen (1999) _Construing
    Experience Through Meaning: A Language-Based Approach to Cognition_,
    Cassell, London.

By the term 'language-based approach', Halliday meant the analysis
of language as it is used (i.e., corpora).  He began his work at
Cambridge University, in the late 1950s and early '60s, where he
and Margaret Masterman et al. were using index cards to process
their tiny corpora.  Over the next 40 years, Halliday always
analyzed as much data as he could.  But his ultimate goal, as he
said in the title and subtitle of that book, was to understand
meaning and cognition.

Unlike Chomsky, who never cited any computational work, H & M
cited many NLP publications in their 23-page bibliography. One
of the few people they didn't cite is Chomsky.

Following is a quotation from the book.

John Sowa
______________________________________________________________________

 From Halliday & Matthiessen (1999) p. 602:

15. Language and the making of meaning

Throughout our discussion of language and meaning (and it may be useful
to stress here once again that we have described only the ideational
component of meaning -- the *ideation base* -- not the interpersonal
and textual perspectives), we have tried to present a comprehensive
picture with language at the centre of the stage.  Language is not a
second-order code through which meanings created in some higher-order
realm of existence are mysteriously made manifest and brought to light.
To borrow the conceit that Firth was fond of caricaturing, there are no
"naked ideas" lurking in the background waiting to be clothed.  It is
language that *creates* meaning, in the sense that meaning has for us
as human beings (which is the only sense of it that we can know).


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