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

[Yorick Wilks]

You pinged me on Skype-typing but didnt respond when I typed back--are you OK?
Y

On 9 Oct 2012, at 07:58, kahmad wrote:

> Dear All
> Here is what OED says about corpus and has 'concorded' citations about how the term 'corpus' has been used:
> 
> Definition: The body of written or spoken material upon which a linguistic analysis is based.
> 1956   W. S. Allen in Trans. Philol. Soc. 128   The analysis here presented is based on the speech of a single informant..and in particular upon a corpus of material, of which a large proportion was narrative, derived from approximately 100 hours of listening.
> 1963   Language 39 1   In the analysis of the data, the structural features of the corpora will first be described.
> 1964   E. Palmer tr. A. Martinet Elem. Gen. Ling. ii. 40   The theoretical objection one may make against the ‘corpus’ method is that two investigators operating on the same language but starting from different ‘corpuses’, may arrive at different descriptions of the same language.
> 1971   J. B. Carroll et al. Word Frequency Bk. p. xxvii,   How many types does one have to ‘know’ to know 95% of the tokens in the population of texts from which a corpus has been derived?
> 1983   G. Leech et al. in Trans. Philol. Soc. 25   We hope that this will be judged..as an attempt to explore the possibilities and problems of corpus-based research by reference to first-hand experience, instead of by a general survey.
> 
> OED, I am told, reflects standard British and American English usage and is based on a 'representative' corpus.  I am sure the same is true of Collins, Longmans and M. Webster
> 
> Best
> 
> 
> On 09-10-2012 12:44, John F Sowa wrote:
>> Undefined terms by scientists:
>> 
>> No physicist can define the term 'physics' -- except in some
>> verbal definition that is empty, such as "physics is the study
>> of physical phenomena".
>> 
>> No biologist can define the term 'biology' -- except in some
>> verbal definition that is empty, such as "biology is the study
>> of life".
>> 
>> In each case, the defining term is just as undefined as the
>> term that is being defined.
>> 
>> You can replace the word 'physics' or 'biology' with the
>> name of any science.
>> 
>> Every philosopher from Kant to Wittgenstein has said that only
>> arbitrarily stipulated terms, such as those in mathematics,
>> can be defined by necessary and sufficient conditions.
>> 
>> Many terms in physics are defined mathematically in terms of
>> others, but physicists keep changing the definitions whenever
>> they find new evidence and formulate new theories.
>> 
>> John Sowa
>> 
>> 
>> 
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> 
> -- 
> Best wishes
> 
> Khurshid Ahmad. PhD, FBCS, FTCD, CITP
> Professor of Computer Science
> School of Computer Science and Statistics
> Trinity College
> Dublin 2
> IRELAND
> 
> Phone: 00353 1 896 8429 (Labs: 00 353 1 8968435)
> Fax 353 1 677 2204
> Webpage: www.cs.tcd.ie/khurshid.ahmad
> 
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