[Corpora-List] Fw: Re: Is corpora of texts an object?

[Bill Louw]

--- On Mon, 8/10/12, Bill Louw <louwfirth at yahoo.com> wrote:

From: Bill Louw <louwfirth at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Is corpora of texts an object?
To: "Yuri Tambovtsev" <yutamb at mail.ru>
Date: Monday, 8 October, 2012, 13:26

Why look for a cognitive feature? When data consisted of very few utterances, we needed concepts to explain those data. But the quality of empiricism in large corpora is now sufficient to falsify intuition and even its best thought-up concepts. Most of subtext is opaque to intuition. It was Paulo Freire who wrote: 'Read the word in order to read the world.' That was analogue reading. Turn that on its head to obtain digital reading: Use large reference corpora (samples of the world) to read single instances of the word and relegate concepts to the realm of small talk and polite conversation, where they belong. 

If we do not banish mentalism, we will find ourselves looking for thousands of unwilling subjects in need of brain surgery, and then, treating each of them as a potential Dickens or Hemingway. Nice work if it attracts
 funding!

Bill Louw
University of Zimbabwe
--- On Mon, 8/10/12, Yuri Tambovtsev <yutamb at mail.ru> wrote:

From: Yuri Tambovtsev <yutamb at mail.ru>
Subject: [Corpora-List] Is corpora of texts an object?
To: corpora at uib.no
Date: Monday, 8 October, 2012, 12:18



 
 



Dear corpora members, thanks a lot of your answers 
to yutamb at mail.ru  It is good that it 
stimulated discussion. I've got a second question: can one speak about some 
corpora of texts as an object? That is can we call this linguistic entity an 
object? If it is an object, then what methods can we apply to study how 
homogeneous this object is? Can can we measure that Dickens corpora is more 
homogeneous or less homogeneous than Hemingway corpora by some 
cognitive feature? For instance the use of colour terms? Can we call it a 
cognitive feature? Looking forward to hearing to my e-mail address yutamb at mail.ru  Be well, sincerely yours 
Yuri Tambovtsev, Novosibirsk, Russia

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