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

[Trevor Jenkins]

On 8 Oct 2012, at 13:32, "Krishnamurthy, Ramesh" <r.krishnamurthy at aston.ac.uk> wrote:

> #7 Trevor wrote:
> 
>> I would change it to "corpus = text collected for the purpose of quantitative and/or qualitative analysis".
> 
> If you recall, this is what I started with. It is the application of corpus techniques that makes the collection 'a corpus' - *within the field of corpus linguistics*. But other researchers may use the same dataset for other purposes; and even a linguist's ultimate purpose may lie beyond the linguistic analysis itself…?

Actually I don't recall your starting position. Probably because of your submergence of multiple replies into a single message. Really does make it difficult to thread together the points.

> #16 Trevor wrote:

See 14 other responses. Really makes it hard to work out who and what you are replying to.

>> But there's still a selection process involved which skews the language used.
>> Now the irony is that until such time as a large scale corpus of truly informal unrehearsed unscripted utterances
>> exists we won't be able to do any comparisons between the lexical choices and grammar
>> constructions of normal language.
> 
>> cf Alex wrote: "There will always be a compromise between what you really
>> want and what you can reasonably collect.
> 
> I agree that all corpora are skewed by the selection process (see my comments on 'random' and 'representative' above). However, you use many qualifiers ('truly informal, unrehearsed, unscripted') that would be extremely difficult to evaluate, culminating in 'normal'?

I suspect that's because I want language of Occupy's 99% not of the 1%.

Plus I didn't say is wasn't hard to acquire such language. What I am saying is we as corpora compiler need to shift our attention from the 1% to the 99%, from an elitist view of how controls language to how it is used by everyone.

Regards, Trevor.

<>< Re: deemed!


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