“Corpus Linguistics” or “Computer-aided Armchair Linguistics”

Abstract Armchair linguistics does not have a good name in some linguistics circles. A caricature of the armchair linguist is something like this. He sits in a deep soft comfortable armchair, with his eyes closed and his hands clasped behind his head. Once in a while, he opens his eyes, sits up abruptly shouting, “Wow, what a neat fact!”, grabs his pencil, and writes something down. Then he paces around for a few hours in the excitement of having come still closer to knowing what language is really like. (There isn’t anybody exactly like this, but there are some approximations.) Corpus linguistics does not have a good name in some linguistics circles. A caricature of the corpus linguist is something like this. He has all the primary facts that he needs, in the form of a corpus of approximately one zillion running words, and he sees his job as that of deriving secondary facts from his primary facts. At the moment he is busy determining the relative frequencies of the eleven parts of speech as the first word of a sentence versus as the second word of a sentence. (There isn’t anybody exactly like this, but there are some approximations.) These two don’t speak to each other very often, but when they do, the corpus linguist says to the armchair linguist, “Why should I think that what you tell me is true?”, and the armchair linguist says to the corpus linguist, “Why should I think that what you tell me is interesting?” This paper is a report of an armchair linguist who refuses to give up his old ways but who finds profit in being a consumer of some of the resources that corpus linguists have created.

Hali tarjima qilinmagan