Seeing clearly: Frame Semantic, Psycholinguistic, and Cross ...

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 31
Introspection, in the sense of conscious attention to and reporting of one's own
mental processes was important in the early period of psychology, e.g. Wundt, but is not
usually considered a credible source of linguistic data. A notable exception to this opinion
is Wierzbicka (1985), who is clearly within the philosophical tradition when she claims that
\. . . to understand the structure of the concept means to describe fully and
accurately the idea [of the prototype]. And to describe it fully and accurately we
have to discover the internal logic of the concept. This is best done not through
interviews, not through laboratory experiments, and not through reports of
casual, super cial impressions or intuitions (either of `informants' or the analyst
himself), but through methodical introspection and thinking. (p.19, emphasis in
the original)
Monolingual corpus data can be an invaluable counterpoise to the analyst's
own judgements, as eloquently expressed in Ruhl 1989:
Actual data without intuition hardly qualify as data at all. But intuition without
su cient supporting actual data is barren; both are necessary. The debate
on relative merits has been at best short-sightedness, at worst a barrier to genuine
semantic research. The greatest need presently in semantic research is for
abundant actual data with which our intuitions can do their work well. (p.16)
In any serious work with a corpus, one invariably nds discrepancies in both di-
rections, i.e. one expects things one does not nd in the corpus and one nds things one
did not expect. Finding the unexpected simply provides more linguistic data to explain.
Failing to nd an expected pattern might mean either that one's hypothesis was wrong, or
(supposing that one has other attestations proving that the pattern is part of the language)
that the corpus is too small or wrongly selected for one's purposes 9 . For example, most
large corpora are compiled predominantly from written texts; failing to nd (e.g.) certain
kinds of slang in such corpora is by no means proof that they are not part of the spoken
language.
An inherent problem in working with a corpus is the tradeo between uniformity
of the dialect represented and the total size and coverage of the corpus; the larger the corpus
and the more varied its sources, the more likely one is to nd examples that are unacceptable
in the dialect under investigation (usually by default the researcher's own) but acceptable
in some other dialect. Obviously, the better corpus searching tools at one's disposal and
the more fully (and accurately!) annotated the corpus, the more one can discover.
9 Fillmore (1992) has a good description of how linguists should use corpora. For a well-reasoned discussion
of the need to balance introspection and corpus studies, see also Ruhl (1989:13-16)