use of corpora based

[N. Chipere]

On Wed, 15 Dec 1999, Brian MacWhinney wrote:

> Marianne, Joan, and other people interested in corpora,
>
>   Mariane is right in saying that "there may be considerably more active,
> corpus-based linguistics going on than many realize."  But why is this
> pivotal aspect of linguistics so low-profile?

>   One way of increasing the profile of corpus-based work is for linguists and
> their allies to begin to develop more effective ways of sharing corpora,
> including spoken language corpora.  One move in this direction is the new
> TalkBank project, which NSF (KDI/Linguistics/SBE) has recently funded.  (see
> http://talkbank.org)

Yet another way is, as far as possible, to base discussions of grammar
on corpora rather than to rely purely on intuition.

- Ngoni