[Corpora-List] FW: Gender differences in language

[James L. Fidelholtz]

Emiliano Guevara wrote that we should "...try to find a balance between ...
logorrheic impulses and
the aims of a public information space: some people make interesting
questions, others give pertinent answers...."

Without denying that some of us (who, through modesty, will remain nameless)
*do* have logorrheic impulses (a seventh-grade companion once stymied me by
accusing me of "sesquipedalian verbiage" -- sorry, Emiliano), it is quite
clear that there is a full and fine gradient between what many see as
'interesting questions ... and pertinent answers', on the one hand, and
'logorrheic impulses' (hereinafter 'LI') on the other. Personally, I find
two good things about this list:

1) it has more good discussions than any other list I can think of (I would
miss only LinguistNetwork more if I didn't have email, and that only because
of the full listing of meetings and books that it has); and

2) it is by far the most helpful list I know of when people (novices or
advanced corpus analysts alike) have questions about corpus mechanics, etc.
This, I believe, is because: a) most of the best practitioners in Corpus
Linguistics are on this list; and
                                                               b) for
whatever reason, Corpus Linguists [or corpus practitioners from other
fields] seem to be more helpful than run-of-the-mill list members of other
lists. This may be because most of us (if I can presumptuously include
myself here) learned how to manipulate corpora pretty much the hard way: by
trial and error, so we tend to be easy-going with novices and with others
who may have taken a different road to corpora than we did.

For these reasons, I'm proud to be a member of this list, and generally read
all contributions that are not obviously way out of the areas that I am
interested in. And I'm rarely sorry I did.


To get back to the LI issue: we do need to recognize that Emiliano has
decent reasons for saying what he does. Still, many interesting comments
occur during 'logorrheic' divagations. And if we can accept that most of us
are intelligent (and I think we can), then wading through a little logorrhea
is a small price to pay for the occasional nuggets one finds therein.
Likewise, as I already intimated above, I personally find very little that I
would really classify as logorrhea. When I do run across some, it becomes
easy to lump such contributions with those out of my area of interest and
just skip them.

Jim


On 3/29/08, Dr DJ Hatch <drdjhatch at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> When I was an undergrad we were taught, if I remember correctly, that what
> is innate is (a) universal grammar.
> ...
> Oh, I forgot to reply to the query on 'prescriptive grammar'. It's merely
> the grammar taught by language teachers and compiled by the grammarians
> who
> serve that industry. Such persons have led me to the belief that ALL
> languages are over-grammaticalised  by those who give us prescriptive
> grammars, and then by ourselves through our acceptance and use of the
> stuff.
> ...
> A very sensible grammarian once suggested in my hearing that a language
> needs either strict word order (plus prepositions, etc) or strict word
> ending rules (so without prepositions). This seems a rather persuasive
> hypothesis. But are there any languages out there which conform to it?
> If not, was that grammarian wrong, or do we actually have too much
> grammar?
>
> ... it seems to me that the pivotal issue remains ­
> which parts of language are grammatical and which not? Ie, how much of
> 'meaning' ­ if any ­ is covered/explained by grammar. This sounds a very
> amateurish question. But it seems to be a not unimportant one. Over the
> years a number of my colleagues have suggested that one problem here is
> the
> poverty of sub-disciplines such as (traditional) semantics, which seemed
> to
> be very influential in Cricean 'pragmatics'.
>
> I really think it is unclear to many (in and around linguistics) as to
> where
> grammar ends and where some other stuff begins (that is, the stuff and the
> sub-discipline responsible for 'keeping it in order').
> ...
>



-- 
James L. Fidelholtz
Posgrado en Ciencias del Lenguaje
Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y
     Humanidades
Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de
     Puebla, MÉXICO
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