[Corpora-List] Fwd: examples of the use of the terms "prototypical" or "prototypicality"

Sun Jun 29 07:09:30 UTC 2014

More from Patrick Hanks, forwarded by his permission.

Kev

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Patrick Hanks <patrick.w.hanks at gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Jun 28, 2014 at 12:59 PM
Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] examples of the use of the terms "prototypical"
or "prototypicality"
To: "Kevin B. Cohen" <kevin.cohen at gmail.com>, Alex Boulton <
alex.boulton at univ-lorraine.fr>

Hello again Kevin,

As far as my tutorial at RANLP and the quotes in corpora-list are
concerned, there is no contradiction, though I would not go so far as to
say "it's actually the normal cases that are quite interesting."  The point
I want to make here is that linguists and lexicographers alike have a
primary duty to develop empirically well-founded accounts of normal cases
before moving on to the edges.  Pre-corpus linguistics does not--cannot--do
this, so it has no reliable basis for identifying edge cases and studying
them. Insofar as it does not do this it is not well anchored and is
unreliable.

& & &

"Prototypical, normal usage is very easy to spot..."

So yes, I stand by that remark. The key word here is "spot", as opposed to
"invent".

Laying it on with a trowel: "Prototypical, normal usage is very easy to
spot in a corpus (and even in a single text), but much harder to invent by
consulting our intuitions: if we have learned one thing in the first thirty
years of corpus linguistics, it is that intuitions are unreliable guides to
what is normal. This is probably because humans, like all mammals, are
hard-wired to focus on the new, the unusual and ignore what they think is
normal."

& & &

Please feel free to post this email on the corpora-list discussion, if the
spirit so moves you. I will copy it anyway to Alex Boulton, as I believe he
would be interested.

Best regards,

Patrick

On 28 June 2014 08:23, Kevin B. Cohen <kevin.cohen at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi!  I was surprised by the quote below from your book.  One of the things
> that I got from your RANLP tutorial a couple of years ago was that if you
> sit a bunch of linguists down and ask them to come up with examples of word
> usages, they will tend to come up with edge cases, but it's actually the
> normal cases that are quite interesting.  Did I misinterpret you?
>
> Kev
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Alex Boulton <alex.boulton at univ-lorraine.fr>
> Date: Sat, Jun 28, 2014 at 8:00 AM
> Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] examples of the use of the terms
> "prototypical" or "prototypicality"
> To: Erin McKean <erin at logocracy.com>
> Cc: corpora at uib.no
>
>
> Dear all
>
> Various bits of discussion on this in several places in Patrick's 2013
> book, including around pp90-105 and 340, but it's pretty much what the
> whole book is about - norms (cf prototypes) not just of lexis but of pretty
> much any type of language use, and exploitations.
>
>    - Hanks, P. 2013. *Lexical Analysis: Norms and Exploitations*.
>    Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
>
> Some great quotes too, eg p91-92 "Prototypical, normal usage is very easy
> to spot...; it is also very boring."
>
> Best
> alex
>
>
>  _____________________________
>
> *Alex Boulton *
> Professor of English and Applied Linguistics
>
> Université de Lorraine : Pearl, Erudi, Dépt d'anglais
>  <boulton at univ-nancy2.fr>
>
> homepage: http://bit.ly/BoultonATILF
>
>
> Responsable équipe Didactique (Crapel)
>
> Atilf : CNRS, UL
> (+33) 03 54 50 51 06
>
>
> ReCALL, Eurocall, Geras, TaLC
>
> ------------------------------
>
> *De: *"Erin McKean" <erin at logocracy.com>
> *À: *corpora at uib.no
> *Envoyé: *Samedi 28 Juin 2014 03:26:25
> *Objet: *[Corpora-List] examples of the use of the terms "prototypical"
> or        "prototypicality"
>
>
> Dear Corpora-Lers,
>
> Does anyone have handy citations for the use of "prototypical" or
> "prototypicality" in corpus linguistics to mean something roughly
> equivalent to "the most central use of a word, especially in regards to
> referents or collocations"?
>
> I'm thinking of the case where you describe senses of a word in an order
> that roughly maps to "core -- periphery" rather than historical order or
> frequency of use. E.g. for things like "cask", the "water-tight vessel"
> would be a more prototypical sense than the "unit of capacity for what
> can be held in a cask" sense.
>
> My feeling is that this is described quite beautifully by Patrick Hanks
> somewhere but I can't seem to find a reference!
>
> Any help gratefully appreciated!
>
> Yours,
>
> Erin
> ---------------------
> Erin McKean
> @emckean/@reverb/@wordnik
> wordnik.com
> helloreverb.com
>
>
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>
>
> --
> Kevin Bretonnel Cohen, PhD
> Biomedical Text Mining Group Lead, Computational Bioscience Program,
> U. Colorado School of Medicine
> 303-916-2417
> http://compbio.ucdenver.edu/Hunter_lab/Cohen
>
>
>
>

-- 
Kevin Bretonnel Cohen, PhD
Biomedical Text Mining Group Lead, Computational Bioscience Program,
U. Colorado School of Medicine
303-916-2417
http://compbio.ucdenver.edu/Hunter_lab/Cohen
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