[Corpora-List] RE : Annotation layers: missing reference

[John F. Sowa]

On 11/20/2010 10:36 AM, chris brew wrote:
> it's safe to assume that most things about corpora were discovered and
> carefully documented (but not necessarily marketed in the US) before 1970

To support that point, following is a comment by Sydney Lamb:

Robert Lees "was heard to comment at that same meeting [LSA in 1960]
upon how strange it was that some linguists were still finding it
interesting to analyze texts instead of just asking native speakers
about their intuitions."

This is from p. 29 of _Language and Reality_ by Sydney Lamb,
London and New York: Continuum, 2004.

Following is an excerpt from a very brief biography of C. C. Fries:

"Fries sought to describe English as it was rather than as it ought
to be. In _American English Grammar_ (1940), he investigated social-
class differences through the study of letters written to a government
agency. In defining the scope of this enquiry, he declared ‘that there
can be no correctness apart from usage’. A second descriptive work,
_The Structure of English_ (1952), drew on recorded telephone
conversations; his innovative approach in that volume emphasized
‘signals of structural meaning’ that could be isolated and described
from the stream of speech rather than from the ‘ideas’ expressed."

 From Tom McArthur. FRIES, Charles C(arpenter). _Concise Oxford
Companion to the English Language_. 1998.

In the 1950s, information theory, N-grams, and other statistical
techniques were becoming popular.  The computers and storage
devices of the day were extremely limited, but many linguists
including Lamb, Fries, and others, had been doing interesting
work in analyzing corpora (rather small by today's standards)
by hand.

The turning point came when Chomsky (1957) declared that "semantic
and statistical studies of language... appear to have no direct
relevance to the problems of determining or characterizing the
set of grammatical utterances.  I think that we are forced to
conclude that grammar is autonomous and independent of meaning,
and that probabilistic models give no particular insight into
some of the basic problems of syntactic structure."  (p. 17)

John Sowa

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