Hi Xiaotian,
I remember the telescope image being used by John Sinclair, about
15th C astronomers and sailors,
making the point that before telescopes, most people thought the
earth was flat, and
that the sun orbited around the earth (just as many pre-corpus
linguistic concepts
are now being questioned). But I can't remember exactly how many
years ago I first heard it.
Probably late 1980s...
I use it in my seminars, and I'm fairly sure I have quoted it in one
or two articles, and sometimes attributed
it to John and sometimes not... Like many of these analogies, I think
it gets passed substantially
more by word of mouth than in writing.
I also use the 'particle/wave' analogy for the 'lexico-grammar'
continuum in seminars, but can't even remember where I
first heard that or who from...
Hope this helps.
Best
Ramesh
At 19:00 13/12/2005, Xiaotian Guo wrote:
>Dear colleagues
>
>I remember Michael Stubbs once used an analogy in stressing the
>importance of the advent of corpora to linguists and the analogy is
>the creation of telescope to astronauts. But I forgot the source.
>Could anybody direct me to the reference?
>
>Michael, if you could see the query, you are more than welcome to
>reply youself.
>
>
>Best
>
>
>Xiaotian Guo
>
>PhD candidate
>The University of Birmingham
Ramesh Krishnamurthy
Lecturer in English Studies
School of Languages and Social Sciences
Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK
Tel: +44 (0)121-204-3812
Fax: +44 (0)121-204-3766
http://www.aston.ac.uk/lss/english/
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