First image link is broken... don't know anything about Ngram viewer - but you can't diss a tool based on the data it is accessing; And unfortunately, although corpora are much better (bigger, more specialized, utilizing spoken, not only written text) than they used to be (e.g., Kucera & Frances 1967), they still pretty much are lacking in many regards.
Hehe, I love the Ngram Viewer, of course. It's a great PR move for corpus linguistics (similar to Resnik's recent Language Log comments about IBM's Watson competing on Jeopardy: it helps get the incentives right).
But this was more or less a nod to a Twitter exchange with a grad student, not meant to be serious. I should have made that more clear.
"Laymen are generally lousy linguists: they do not know what questions to ask, they do not know how to look for answers to them and they are too ready to accept generalizations to which they could easily find counter examples." ---James D. McCawley
"Asking a linguist how many languages they speak is like asking a doctor how many diseases they have." ---Lynne Murphy (aka lynneguist)
I am a linguist who has worked in academia, government consulting, NLP, and the branding and marketing industry.
I used to be a graduate student in linguistics specializing in the syntax-semantics interface and verb classes (can you say "Ay-Bee-Dee" boys and girls?).
I'm currently a software trainer/consultant with a large defense contractor in the Washington DC metro area.
3 comments:
proof positive....
true dat...
First image link is broken... don't know anything about Ngram viewer - but you can't diss a tool based on the data it is accessing; And unfortunately, although corpora are much better (bigger, more specialized, utilizing spoken, not only written text) than they used to be (e.g., Kucera & Frances 1967), they still pretty much are lacking in many regards.
Hehe, I love the Ngram Viewer, of course. It's a great PR move for corpus linguistics (similar to Resnik's recent Language Log comments about IBM's Watson competing on Jeopardy: it helps get the incentives right).
But this was more or less a nod to a Twitter exchange with a grad student, not meant to be serious. I should have made that more clear.
Heh. Chances are this is just reflecting occurrences of a construction like "It is true that..." But thanks for investigating the issue! =P
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