[Corpora-List] little favour

[John F. Sowa]

Diana,

Very similar phenomena arise in every field:

 > what is the relationship between corpus data (whose use
 > Ramesh so well defended to give an appropriate description
 > of an English verb) and the (hypothesized poor) correlation
 > with made-up sentences from corpus linguists, which Geoffrey
 > Sampson and Ulf Magnusson consider such an interesting question.

Anyone who designs a system of any kind (anything ranging from
a computer program to an automobile to a theory of grammar)
has a well-defined view of the system, and that view will guide
(usually unconsciously) how the designer chooses test cases.

For that reason, companies typically make sure that the people
who test a program (or automobile) have different skills, habits,
and background from those who designed it.

For similar reasons, it is very difficult for a linguist who has
strong views about how language "should" work to imagine all the
possible ways that people actually use language.

 > I am absolutely for using our own language skills and introspection
 > to interpret corpus data.

That is a good way of using a corpus -- as a tool for stimulating
or broadening one's intuition.

John