[Corpora-List] Bootcamp

Thu Sep 11 07:18:30 UTC 2008

Hi Martin, and and any imaginary people who might raed this.

I agree absolutely. This is about sharing knowledge and respecting the input of
the humanities traditions, not watering down.

I don't know about the imaginary Geoffrey, but this one does not teach English
to French students. The fact that corpus linguistics seems to equate with
English linguistics always annoys me as corpus linguistics should be about language.

I, the real Geoffrey, I think, have not taught languages in years and my working
language is French, but what I claim is that language teaching and lexicography,
often for learner dictionaries, have given tremendous insights into language and
will continue to do so. This is generally Sinclairian corpus linguistics, the
sort of corpus linguistics that John Sinclair promoted and which Wolfgang,
another imaginary person, described in a real article in IJCL in 2005. It seems
a pity to water such a discipline down to satisfy the needs of people who may
have only more recently joined the bandwagon. This does not mean that different
flavours of corpus linguistics should not exist, I am very much for academic
tolerance and exchange of ideas, that is what makes this list so good.

I work a lot with computer sciences, I have colleagues who respect my input and
I respect theirs. We endeavour to build applications by bringing together and
confronting our different outlooks in both theoretical and applied aspects. The
real Geoffrey actually leads a department in document management and leads a
masters course in cognitive and information sciences, within which we have a
speciality in digital linguistics (aka corpus linguistics but the man from the
ministry knew better). But he comes in as a corpus linguist and is proud of it.
The real one runs corpus linguistic days in Lorient (Brittany, near France )
that are aimed at bringing people together, teachers and computer scientists and
all. The main language is French, but we are very tolerant and many on the
programme committee actually speak the language of this country, Breton, so
non-French speakers could try that or the other international language, English.

However, we must not confuse corpus linguistics and corpora list. This list
addresses everyone interested in corpora and their applications. It must never
be hijacked by a few of any flavour, (not that it is at the moment actually).
Its force is in its openness. One point worth thinking of that that we do all
have in common and that is empiricism. This point is made very nicely in another
article in the 2005 (vol.10 n°1) issue of the International Journal of Corpus
Linguistics by Geoffrey Sampson (Quantifying the shift).
He makes the point that science, since Galileo has been empirical, that surely
is a characteristic that all of us on corpora list share.

Off to look for sun in Cardiff so off line for a while. We'll be talking
multilingual corpus linguistics, and they have promised me sun.

Geoffrey

Surlignage Martin Wynne <martin.wynne at oucs.ox.ac.uk>:

> 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..."
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Corpora mailing list
> Corpora at uib.no
> http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora
> 
> 

-- 
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

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

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