Timeline for Submitting Answers that merely answer the question
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
12 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Apr 13, 2017 at 12:55 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
replaced http://ell.stackexchange.com/ with https://ell.stackexchange.com/
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| Feb 17, 2017 at 15:50 | comment | added | Mark Hubbard | For the uninitiated, what are "COCA, BNC and GloWbE"? Your answer failed to provide links. ;-) | |
| Sep 14, 2014 at 13:39 | comment | added | jimsug | @supercat if you have corpus data for rhyming texts - poems or plays, for instance - it can give you a clue as to how words are pronounced. | |
| Sep 14, 2014 at 13:38 | comment | added | jimsug | Wow, I left this alone for too long! I think evidence is a tricky notion; personally, I'd think that a post that says "People in <my region of the world> say this, that and the other" is better than a post that just asserts their claims as being universally applicable. Just recognising that your dialect exists, and is limited, is more than most people do. Certainly, corpus data, and real-world examples of languages usage, are probably preferable (and in that order), spoken language is extremely underrepresented in corpus data, which is a shame. | |
| Sep 10, 2014 at 23:01 | comment | added | supercat | @snailplane: Is there anything in that corpus which would indicate pronunciation? For example, I suspect that "mischievious" was probably coined as a portmanteau of "mischievous" and "devious"; evidence of where it entered the language could provide evidence of that. | |
| Jul 29, 2014 at 23:09 | comment | added | user230 | @Tiercelet I can definitely agree that corpora have their limits. I'd like to point out, though, that there are corpora of spontaneous spoken language, including the 95-million-word COCA "Spoken" sub-corpus, which is freely available. If you'd like to research spoken English, particularly American spoken English, it's a decent place to start. | |
| Jul 29, 2014 at 20:14 | comment | added | user230 | @Tiercelet I agree with you that not everything needs to be cited here. We're not writing academic papers. If I had to cite everything I said, I'd probably write a lot fewer answers. (That said, I do provide references or citations fairly often.) | |
| Jul 29, 2014 at 20:12 | comment | added | Tiercelet | @snailplane oh sure--sorry, overstated things; hard to fully nuance positions in short comments--but corpus data has plenty of limitations as well, particularly around spoken language usage. More importantly, a lot of answerers on this site are likely to have expertise that exceeds their access to/knowledge of corpus resources. I think it'd be a disservice to the site to restrict answerer participation to that small subset, particularly as great expertise often encourages answers that may be too technical to be easily understood by the asker. Will take this to an answer shortly. | |
| Jul 29, 2014 at 20:02 | comment | added | user230 | @Tiercelet Not so. Descriptive linguistics is thankfully not limited to the intuition of a single native speaker. Although judgments are useful data, native speakers can and do vary widely in usage, and no one speaker is likely to be fully aware of the range of usage and how it varies. Every idiolect has its own idiosyncrasies. Fortunately, we have a wealth of corpus evidence available to help us figure out what is standard and what is not, what is grammatical and what is not, and so on. | |
| Jul 29, 2014 at 19:53 | comment | added | Tiercelet | I agree that evidence is preferable to no evidence. However, ELL is a tricky field for this, because the entire point of descriptive linguistics is that a native speaker's grasp of language justifies itself: native use of language is all the expertise anyone can have, and if a book disagrees, the book may well be wrong (/overly prescriptive). Lately I've been trying to identify not "correct" usages but whether something would seem unusual within the dialectical regions native to me--I think that helps some of these issues; definitive cites aren't always easy to find... | |
| Jul 27, 2014 at 22:21 | history | edited | user230 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
deleted 2 characters in body
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| Jul 25, 2014 at 10:32 | history | answered | jimsug | CC BY-SA 3.0 |