RE: Corpora: history of corpora
Lou Burnard (lou.burnard@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk)
Fri, 4 Dec 1998 17:38:42 +0000 (GMT)
Chris likes to be provocative so I don't take as much exception as I
might to his suggestion that those wicked old BNC designers were
"trying to lock potential users into their ideas of what's
important". On the contrary, as he ought to know by now, the BNC was
designed very specifically not to be dependent on any particular
software. The criticisms he makes of SARA ("providing us willy-nilly
with an engine that can't generate wordlists or search on tags
alone....") are fair enough, if a bit overstated (SARA will provide
you with the same information as you might get from a wordlist, and
there is in fact a wordlist included on the CDs) -- but they don't
apply to the BNC. You can generate wordlists and you can search on
tags in the BNC. You just need to use the right tool for the job.
I assumed that "water up" is meant to be the opposite of "water down"
and thus synonymous with "enrich". Clearly until we have more evidence
of people actually using this phrase, instead of talking about it,
we'll never know what it means. I'm sure we can all think of lots of
verbs that go with "up" which are miles away from Chris's suggested
paradigm (shake up, look up, and of course fuck up, all spring to
mind)
my friday pennorth
Lou