[Corpora-List] Bootcamp

[Martin Wynne]

Wow, what a time to choose to go on holiday and not read Corpora for  a 
few weeks.

I think I've caught up with most of the discussion now. I particularly 
agree with posts numbers 17, 19, 24, 74, 229 and 332 in the thread ;-).

My immediate impression of this discussion is that we have people from 
different academic disciplines discussing together theory, methods, 
resources - and of course that's great, we all love that, it's  
interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, multi-disciplinary, innit. I'll 
put it on my CV now that I contributed to it, I'll think up a research 
grant proposal, and my employers will love it.

However, I find it somewhat problematic that many of the contributions 
seem to labour under the misapprehension that we are all from one 
discipline, with one goal. What academic community we might constitute, 
I'm not sure.

Subscribers to the corpora list? Certainly.
Corpus linguists? I'm not sure.

Bill wants to analyse collocations in poems.
Linas wants to find patterns.
Wolfgang wants to reveal the ways that meanings are created in texts.
Mark wants to build corpora.
Yorick wants to build robots.
Geoffrey wants to teach English to French students.
(All names above are imaginary and any relation to real subscribers to 
this list is accidental.)

So we seem to have an attempt at a discussion involving literary 
critics, mathematicians, sociolinguists, data providers, computer 
scientists, and language teachers about the nature of 'their' discipline.

 From this perspective, it seems to me highly unlikely that we will find 
common cause in what we think corpora and corpus analysis are FOR, how 
we should use them, or what a course in using corpora should include.

That does not mean that there is no such thing as corpus linguistics. So 
what might it be? I don't think that we should be deceived into 
believing that the necessity of the use of computers and electronic 
resources makes it somehow a branch of computer science (any more than 
the fact that the producers of language have minds should make 
linguistics a branch of cognitive science). I believe that corpus 
linguistics is a branch of linguistics, a humanistic discipline 
examining and analysing the nature and role of language in human 
communication and society. Corpus linguistics is the branch of this 
discipline which takes advantage of the possibilities of computational 
resources and tools to examine the data of real language in use.

Computer scientists and other harmless drudges are of course still 
welcome to drop by and listen in.

Martin

PS Favourite quote of the thread:
Yorick: "Some of my friends are corpus linguists, but..."

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