RE: Corpora: when does a subcorpus become a corpus

From: Sampo Nevalainen (samponev@cc.joensuu.fi)
Date: Fri Jan 04 2002 - 14:36:55 MET

  • Next message: Yuri Tambovtsev: "Corpora: Is corpus phonetics a part of corpus linguistics?"

    At 16:05 4.1.2002 +0300, P bI K O B_ B.B. wrote:
    > I would like to make a little example. There was a report here about
    > distribution of the meanings of the verb "moch'". This Russian verb has
    > two main meanings - "can" and "may".
    > Would my distributions based on the corpora like Corpus of Russian
    > Proverbs, Political metaphors or Russian newspapers have any value - or -
    > in other words - tell us smth about Russian language as a whole? I think
    > that the proof of it can give the texts of general carefully compiled
    > balanced represantative corpus of Russian language.

    I will also try to make it more concrete. In my opinion, the value of your
    distributions from any single corpus is pretty low (from the point of view
    of the language as a whole), unless you get more evidence from other
    corpora. If all of the three corpora you mentioned above show a similar
    tendency, you may become more convinced about the feature as a general
    feature of the language "as a whole", but you may still be wrong. In this
    light there is, obviously, no big difference whether you handle the corpora
    as separate subcorpora or as one bunch that you might then call a "general
    corpus"...

    sampo

    ( : ============================================= : )

    Sampo Nevalainen, M.A.
    Researcher
    University of Joensuu
    Savonlinna School of Translation Studies
    P.O.Box 48
    FIN-57101 Savonlinna
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