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

[Patrick Juola]

On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 11:07 AM, Laurence Anthony <anthony0122 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 11:44 PM, Patrick Juola <juola at mathcs.duq.edu> wrote:
>> Actually, that's a pretty good illustration of why definitions are
>> unimportant and why this whole discussion is rather silly.
>
> You say "definitions are unimportant" and this discussion is "silly".
>
> Hmm, many people have contributed. Are we all just being silly?

Yes, bluntly.


>
>> 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.
>
> Can you give me an example of one of the "broad terms" that a
> scientist (e.g. physicist) uses which is not defined?

"Life."  (biology)  "Matter." (physics)  "Mind." (psychology)
"Thought." (psychology, again)  "Illness."  (medicine)

Even "sleep" is tricky to define, as any anaesthesiologist will tell
you.    The question of exactly where and how a patient loses
consciousness is of course, key to this field of medicine -- but our
simple idea of a thin bright definitional line between "sleep" and
"waking" (or "conscious" and "unconscious") is tremendously
oversimplified.   There are dozens of processes involved, many of
which interact, not all of which are turned off at the same rate by
the same process or drug.  Trying to make a definition stretch to
cover all these phenomenon is not just silly, but stupid.   Instead
the practicing scientists focus on defining specialist vocabulary to
describe the specific phenomena they're interested in, just as corpus
linguists will talk about "historical corpora" (which presumably is a
corpus that focuses on historical variance, possibly at the expense of
other aspects).

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