minimum sample

Daniel Riaño danielrr at mad.servicom.es
Wed Mar 3 18:04:22 EST 1999


Dear Cindy,

Cindy Westfall wrote:

>IMHO, the analysis of the entire corpus is the only safe sample for results
>that you intend to apply to the whole corpus. You haven't specified exactly
>what features you are analysing, and perhaps that would make a difference.
>However, one of the features of grammatical and semantic patterns in a
>discourse is not only that they repeat, but also that they deviate.  The
>deviations are 'marked' and are one of many factors that contribute to
>emphasis (prominence).  Sometimes the deviations form a pattern in a given
>text, but not always.  Also, patterns will vary as the discourse develops.

	Thanks Cindy: you are very right that a sound answer to my question
probably depends upon the kind of grammatical analysis you apply to the
text. I was thinking on a syntactical analysis, and more specifically an
immediate constituents analysis.
	True, everybody uses different communicative strategies in
different levels of discourse, but we can admit as a principle for any
study in grammar that one uses one syntax and only one when writing a text
at a given time (sure, a novelist can introduce several characters of very
different social extraction, education, age, etc, each using a somewhat
different norm, or even different systems; and there are societies where
the language among men is radically different from the language used among
women, etc, but that's another problem).
	I think that when we analyse very large relatively homogeneous
written text corpus from an author of the past (pause for a breathe) we
should be able to describe the syntax the author is using with a very high
precision before parsing the whole corpus. Or, in other words, most of
*what we can know* of the syntactical system (and norm) he is using (since
we can *not* ask him directly to answer our linguistic texts) we can know
before parsing the 100% of the corpus. An example could be Ioannes
Chrysostomus: I never took the pain to count the words of his preserved
writings, but most probably they are over the million: I don't think that
after parsing the second five hundred thousand words your conclusions will
be very different from the conclusions you could draw after parsing the
first five hundred thousand!

___________________________________________________________
Daniel Riaño Rufilanchas
c. Santa Engracia 52, 7 dcha.
28010-Madrid, España
___________________________________________________________





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