[Corpora-List] Corpus vs Intuition

[Krishnamurthy, Ramesh]

Well said, Marco!

I too have found the demonstration approach to be much more productive...
:-)

...but unfortunately it is usually also time-consuming, because it involves doing all the hard work first, finding/creating an appropriate dataset, analysing it, and presenting the results in a suitable format for the non-corpus colleagues...
:-(

Best
Ramesh

Ramesh Krishnamurthy
Lecturer in English Studies, School of Languages and Social Sciences,
Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK
Tel: +44 (0)121-204-3812 ; Fax: +44 (0)121-204-3766 [Room NX08, 10th
Floor, North Wing of Main Building]
http://www1.aston.ac.uk/lss/staff/krishnamurthyr/
Director, ACORN (Aston Corpus Network project): http://acorn.aston.ac.uk/

-----Original Message-----
From: corpora-bounces at uib.no [mailto:corpora-bounces at uib.no] On Behalf Of Marco Baroni
Sent: 18 September 2008 09:12
To: corpora at uib.no
Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Corpus vs Intuition

My esperience working with colleagues who come form the pure
"uncontrolled grammaticality judgment" angle is that there is no
point in embarking on lengthy discussions about the merits of
corpora: that will only make them more defensive and ideological
about what they are doing.

The best thing is to tackle some theoretical topics they are
interested in, using corpus-based methods. Especially if your corpus-
based results confirm their theoretical predictions, they will become
naturally interested in what you did ;-) -- and, even if the results
go against their predictions, the debate will shift to the empircal
matter at hand, rather than getting stuck in pointless ideological
fights about methodology.

My 2 non-confrontational cents.

Marco









--
Marco Baroni
CIMeC, University of Trento
http://clic.cimec.unitn.it/marco



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