RE: [Corpora-List] American and British English spelling converter

From: Harold Somers (harold.somers@manchester.ac.uk)
Date: Thu Nov 09 2006 - 11:01:08 MET

  • Next message: Karin Axelsson: "Re: [Corpora-List] American and British English spelling converter"

    >
    > I find it fascinating that as soon as we find a linguistic
    > topic which sparks the interest of everyone here, the
    > discussion suddenly makes hardly any reference to corpora.
    > Why are suddenly anecdotes, intuitions, folk theories and
    > made-up examples preferable to consulting corpora?
    >
    > It's a serious question. It seems to me reasonable to bring
    > in these other factors and pieces of evidence to inform a
    > discussion about corpus linguistics, but why is almost no-one
    > consulting a corpus, or consulting research papers based on
    > corpora? Lack of resources? Lack of tools?
    > Don't think that use of corpora is appropriate for this question?
    >

    It's true that a lot of the responses have been of an anecdotal nature,
    but a few have also referred to corpora, especially I notice to REFUTE
    anecdotal claims. This seems to be the heritage of corpus linguistics,
    which I daresay is regrettable.



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