What kinds of data do Columbia School analyses typically use

Data

What kinds of data do Columbia School analyses typically use?

Typically, Columbia School analyses rely heavily on data drawn from natural language use, often written but occasionally spoken. Fabricated data are occasionally used, but only to illustrate familiar and conventional usage. This is for two reasons. First, natural discourse provides examples of striking expressive creativity that would be suspect if fabricated by the analyst himself. Second, naturally-occurring examples offer the possibility of appealing to redundant features in the context in support of the interpret-ation claimed by the analyst. If the analyst were to create both the example (with its interpretation) and the context, the former could not be tested against the latter.

Diver 1969 uses a single text, The Iliad. Huffman 1997 uses a wide variety of French novels, adding to them all three volumes of DeGaulle’s war memoirs. Davis 1992 uses texts supplemented by spoken data. Klein-Andreu uses taped, spoken conversation in her work (see papers in Contini-Morava & Goldberg 1995 and Contini-Morava & Tobin 1999). Reid 1991 draws heavily from contemporary written and spoken journalism. Questionnaire data play a significant role in Garcia and Otheguy 1972, Zubin 1976, Reid 1991 and Wherrity 2001. Wherrity 2001 also provides the first example of a corpus-based analysis.