[Corpora-List] What is corpora and what is not?

[Trevor Jenkins]

On 3 Oct 2012, at 19:44, Michael Rundell <michael.rundell at lexmasterclass.com> wrote:

> Trevor - thanks for your kind words about Atkins & Rundell OGPL.
> 
> But in fact the quote you mention is from John Sinclair not us (it's the same quote Geoffrey Williams rgave, earlier in this thread). Sue Atkins and I refer here to what Sinclair said, but then add 'this is not without its problems', specifically casting doubt on the proposition that a corpus can be 'representative'. On the whole i prefer Adam's simpler definition (in the first response to the original question).

Well I did say "quoted in" ;-) … my personal copy of your book is buried in the (literal) heap of books on my desk so I used Amazon's "Look Inside" for the quote but could not then find the citation to John Sinclair's original. 

Oh yes there are problems. Indeed I have serious reservations about corpora compilation under that regime because it can result in corpora containing only high genre texts such as Dickens novels, rather than "English as she is spoke" (substitute  whichever language(s) is being studied whether English, Swedish, British Sign Language, Mongolian, American, French, etc in that phrase). The selected texts tends to be high level (news papers, journals, political speeches, literature) so edited and redacted rather than the everyday language of the people. That's one serious problem.

There are some exceptions to my high register presumption such as the SUSANNE or CHRISTINE exemplars of children's utterances. But in general I find that existing large corpora neglect the real use of the language; BNC, Brown Oslo, CoCA, etc. Even the newly appeared American Soap Operas corpus on Mark Davies site is still constructed and ultimately "high-brow". They're useful for arguing with high-brow users but don't adequately record the vernacular.

Regards, Trevor.

<>< Re: deemed!


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