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

[Patrick Juola]

On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 9:54 AM, Laurence Anthony <anthony0122 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 9:18 AM, Angus Grieve-Smith <grvsmth at panix.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>     Yes.  Definitions don't have to be illuminating.  A "pack" is a
>> collection of dogs (or cards, or cigarettes, etc.).  Of course there's more
>> to the story than that, but the definition doesn't have to tell the story.
>
> Agreed. But, just to clarify why this discussion is important, I'll
> make the following point:
>
> The whole reason why definitions are important is so that we can
> communicate with others without (or with less) confusion. So, if I say
> "I have a dog" and we both have roughly the same definition of "dog",
> you can roughly understand what I mean. However, if your definition is
> very different from mine, e.g., my "dog" wags its tail and barks,
> whereas your "dog" meows and catches birds, then very quickly we have
> confusion. We see how serious scientists take definitions, when we
> look at the recent discussion on the definition of "planet" in
> astronomy. We can also see how important definitions are by the sheer
> number of them in research papers. Agreed definitions allow people to
> communicate with others about complex concepts.

Actually, that's a pretty good illustration of why definitions are
unimportant and why this whole discussion is rather silly.

If all you want to communicate is that you have a "dog" (or that you
have a "corpus") then we need to understand what you mean by that
word.   But that's also a pointless communication.   We are typically
more interested in what you are doing with your dog/corpus and what
you consider the important properties to be.   If I introduce you to
my pet dog and I say that he's a very good watchdog --  you say that
what I have is not a dog, but a wolf-hybrid, you are a) possibly
correct from a technical standpoint, and b) completely and utterly
missing what I'm actually trying to say.

A corpus is a collection of texts.  If you have a collection of text,
you have a corpus; I will uncaringly grant that because that fact is
of no interest to anyone, probably including yourself.   If there's
something that you want to do with that collection, that will probably
be of interest to me along with the details of your collection (which
may in turn suggest that your collection is well- or ill-suited to
that purpose).   I may want to borrow your collection for an unrelated
purpose.

Similarly, Yuri's question about "is a corpus an object?" is equally
ill-thought-out.   Can you hit it with a hammer?   Then it's not a
physical object.    Is it being studied?  Then it is clearly an
"object" of study.   Am I sufficiently clueless that I don't believe
words can be polysemous?  Then you shouldn't ask my opinion about the
meanings of words....

There's a reason that scientists don't define the meanings of most of
the broad terms they use.  It wastes time on unproductive inquiry.

Patrick

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