[Corpora-List] Corpus vs Intuition

[Dom Widdows]

Dear All,

I agree with more or less everything that's been said - especially the
notion that argument never changes a strongly held belief. Only
demonstration, and very careful demonstration, changes our outlook - and
even then, often leaves us scurrying for counter demonstrations rather than
accepting the evidence before us. Take physics, for example: it's over a
hundred years now since experiments in quantum mechanics demonstrated that
the universe has some clearly non-deterministic characteristics, but for
scientists and philosophers who want to believe in determinism, this hasn't
changed their beliefs at all. The debate over the role (or even existence)
of things like "experience", "introspection", "intuition" was particularly
lively during the period from Descartes to Kant. (Kant used the term
"Anschauung", which apparently doesn't have an adequate English translation,
so we use the term "intuition" - if any of the German speakers on the list
can help explain what "Anschauung" really means, that might help me
somewhat!) The main positions in this minefield, and people's reasons for
preferring one or another, seems to have proceeded in its own path often
independently of scientific evidence or technological advancement.

That's just a preamble to my main question - what, if anything, makes
language different from any other natural phenomenon? Can anyone point to
one point of debate between rationalist and empiricist linguists that is
different in substance from the discussion between introspection and
experience in any other field? A related question would, for example, be "Do
the recent advances in biology and genetics contribute anything genuinely
new to questions about God?" - I see plenty of people on the one hand or the
other claiming that the existence of genes or the complexity of living
things should finally convince you that there is / isn't a God, but all of
these are old arguments supported by new examples, and more often, you see
someone choosing their position and weighting the evidence accordingly,
rather than weighing the evidence and choosing a position accordingly.

I do not mean this to come across as a "bah humbug nothing new under the
sun" posting. I'm hoping that many of the list members may have thought
carefully about what gives language an especially interesting viewpoint on
questions of balancing introspection and experience, and if so, I'd be very
eager to hear what you think.

Best wishes,
Dominic

On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 8:43 AM, Krishnamurthy, Ramesh <
r.krishnamurthy at aston.ac.uk> wrote:

> 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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