RE: [Corpora-List] history of corpus linguistics

From: Ute Römer (ute.roemer@engsem.uni-hannover.de)
Date: Sat Jan 06 2007 - 16:39:25 MET

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    Dear Ronald and others,

    There is a piece by Wolfgang Teubert entitled "A brief history of corpus
    linguistics" which you may find useful in Halliday et al.'s (2004)
    Lexicology and Corpus Linguistics textbook (part of ch. 3; published with
    Continuum). And then Elena Tognini Bonelli and John Sinclair have a relevant
    article in Elsevier's Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd edition,
    2005/6?, ed-in-chief Keith Brown).

    Happy New Year and best wishes... Ute

    ************************************************************
     
    Dr. Ute Römer
    English Department
    Leibniz University of Hanover
    Königsworther Platz 1
    30167 Hannover
    Germany
     
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    -----Original Message-----
    From: owner-corpora@lists.uib.no [mailto:owner-corpora@lists.uib.no] On
    Behalf Of Adam Kilgarriff
    Sent: Saturday, January 06, 2007 11:11 AM
    To: 'Geoffrey Williams'; 'Florian Petran'
    Cc: CORPORA@uib.no
    Subject: RE: [Corpora-List] history of corpus linguistics

    As well as Corpus Linguistics's "own" history (Brown, LOB, ICAME,
    anti-Chomsky), two external influences need mentioning:

            * lexicography - different agenda but responsible for lots of the
    actual corpus-building work and innovation, at least in UK. BNC was
    lexicography-led.
            * NLP / computational linguistics, which has come into the field
    like a schoolyard bully, forcing everything that's not computational into
    submission, collusion or the margins. For history of this aspect, Church
    and Mercer's Intro to the 1993 Sp Issue of Computational linguistics on
    using large corpora (19 (1)) is great reading

    Adam

    -----Original Message-----
    From: owner-corpora@lists.uib.no [mailto:owner-corpora@lists.uib.no] On
    Behalf Of Geoffrey Williams
    Sent: 06 January 2007 08:29
    To: Florian Petran
    Cc: CORPORA@uib.no
    Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] history of corpus linguistics

    As far as I know there is no complete and unexpurgated history as yet, b ut
    I very good background is given from in Graeme Kennedy's introduction to
    corpus linguistics. I recently wrote an explanation of the origins
    contextualist corpus linguistics for a French audience, who often seem to
    confuse corpus linguistics and NLP, and also literary analysis with
    quantitive methods. In looking for information John Sinclair pointed me in
    the direction of a very interesting article by Léon (2005) which kicks into
    touch the boring litany of Chomskyan influence on linguistics this side of
    the pond. Given that John was a prime mover in the development of corpus
    studies in the UK, the interview of with Wolfgang Teubert in the
    introduction the recent republication of the OSTI report by Ramesh
    Krishnamurthy (Sinclair et al 2004) is worth reading, as is the report
    itself as it is a good lesson in humility with so much done to lay the
    foundations of current methodology. Another source in the same ilk is
    Sampson and McCarthy (2004) as this has texts from the pre computer period
    as well as some foundational texts that are no longer easily available.

    Hope this helps

    Best

    Geoffrey

    *Kennedy G.*1998. /An introduction to corpus linguistics./ London & New
    York: Longman

    *Léon, J*. 2005. ‘Claimed and unclaimed sources of /Corpus
    Linguistics’/. /Henry Sweet Society Bulletin/. N°44. pp.36-50.

    *G. Sampson and D. McCarthy (eds). */Corpus Linguistics: Readings// in a
    widening discipline/. London and New York: Continuum, 2004

    *Sinclair J. McH., Jones S., Daley R.* 2004. /English Collocation
    Studies: The OSTI Report/. Londres - New York : Continuum.

    Geoffrey Williams
    Professeur des Universités en Sciences du Langage
    Université de Bretagne Sud, Lorient, France
    geoffrey.williams@univ-ubs.fr

    Florian Petran a écrit :

    > McEnery/Wilson : Corpus Linguistics. An introduction, Edinburgh: EUP
    > 2005 have a chapter on the topic.
    >
    > Harris: The linguistics wars, Oxford: OUP 1993
    > covers the debate with Chomsky, though does not deal explicitly with
    > corpus linguistics.
    >
    > 2007/1/5, Ronald P. Reck <rreck@rrecktek.com>:
    >
    >> Can someone recommend sources for a history of corpus linguistics, and
    >> more specifically string frequency analysis?
    >>
    >> Right now I have:
    >>
    >> Hockney, Susan, 2000. Electronic Texts in the Humanities Oxford
    >> University Press
    >>
    >>
    >> Thanks.
    >>
    >>
    >
    >
    >



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