[Corpora-List] Free text corpora?

[Adam Kilgarriff]

> ...and a "dump" such as this couldn't be further from qualifying as a
corpus, if defined as "a > collection of pieces of language, selected and
ordered according to explicit linguistic criteria > in order to be used as a
sample of the language.”

Sorry, Martin, but your definition of 'corpus' reads like it's designed to
strangle the life out of corpus linguistics. It begs questions about
selection and ordering (?? how does ordering come into it?) and explicit
linguistic criteria, and demotes many things that people refer to as
'corpora' to a lower form of life.   Lexicographically, bad.

I think it's a dream of some corpus linguists as to what they think a corpus
should be, not a fact about how the word is used.  But, delete the middle
clause and we're in agreement:
   "a collection of pieces of language, used as a sample of the language"

Adam

On 2 March 2010 22:55, Martin Wynne <martin.wynne at oucs.ox.ac.uk> wrote:

> Francis Tyers wrote:
>
>> El dt 02 de 03 de 2010 a les 12:38 +0100, en/na Xin Yan va escriure:
>>
>>
>>
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> can anyone tell me, if there are some free text corpora for commercial
>>> purpose?
>>> Thank you in advance!
>>>
>>>
>>
>> You can download dumps of Wikipedia from http://download.wikimedia.org
>> -- they are licensed under the CC-BY-SA or GFDL -- both of which allow
>> commercial use, providing changes made are redistributed under the same
>> licence.
>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>> Fran
>>
>>
>>
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>>
>
> Dumps of wikipedia may be an interesting electronic text collection that
> can be used to help address various linguistic research questions, but I
> think that the request was for a corpus...and a "dump" such as this couldn't
> be further from qualifying as a corpus, if defined as "a collection of
> pieces of language, selected and ordered according to explicit linguistic
> criteria in order to be used as a sample of the language.”
>
> The good news is that corpora are available. If you let us know what sort
> of corpus you are looking for and for what sort of commercial uses you
> intend to put them to, I am sure that there are plenty of people here on the
> mailing list who can help you.
>
> Martin
> Oxford Text Archive
>
>
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> Corpora at uib.no
> http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora
>



-- 
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Adam Kilgarriff
http://www.kilgarriff.co.uk
Lexical Computing Ltd                   http://www.sketchengine.co.uk
Lexicography MasterClass Ltd      http://www.lexmasterclass.com
Universities of Leeds and Sussex       adam at lexmasterclass.com
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