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

[Laurence Anthony]

On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 9:48 AM, Linda Bawcom <linda.bawcom at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> Like so many others, I have followed this thread with interest and I must
> confess, a slight chuckle as we try to hone and agree upon a definition of
> corpus. If I may, I'd like to illustrate how this may result in a somewhat
> fruitless (albeit very interesting) undertaking

Linda,

I enjoyed reading your post. But, are you arguing that your adventure
into you doctoral review of literature on the definitions of synonyms
was "fruitless"? Did you not learn anything new about the concept by
seeing how people defined it differently?

Also, if people did use a different term for the *same* concept,
wasn't that confusing to you? Wouldn't it have been better if they had
all used the same term? Are you arguing that it was *good* that they
all used different terms?

> Here's the bottom line (at last). You won't come up with a (new) definition
> that everyone  will agree upon because some will feel that it should be more
> exacting and others will feel it is too restrictive. And then whose would
> you use? At that point, there may be so many that just about anything could
> be called a corpus (or perhaps almost nothing!).

I think this is where I see the problem. If just about anything can be
called a corpus, the word "corpus" no longer has any (shared) meaning.
It literally becomes *meaningless* outside of the person who said it.
So, by extension, a sentence like "I have a "corpus that contains 230
texts" is also meaningless to anybody else.This sentence only begins
to take on meaning when the writer and reader have shared meanings of
words like "I", "corpus", and "texts". We may not always agree
(completely) on the definitions of the terms, but without some kind of
mutual understanding, the sentence has no meaning. We are no longer
able to communicate.

Laurence.

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