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BLUHM 13
5.1 Web as Corpus
In recent times, it has become somewhat popular to search the Internet to find out how an
expression of interest is actually used. Apparently, the attempt is to surpass the limits of one’s
own linguistic intuitions by appeal to factual language uses. This attempt is commendable, I
believe, but its execution is wanting.
The Internet is indeed an alluring data source because of its sheer size and the relative ease
with which data can be compiled from it. A considered estimate from 2008 calculates that
60% of the generally accessible Internet is in English, consisting of an estimated 3 trillion
(10 12 ) word tokens. 9 Access to all these data is not only relatively easy, but mostly free of
charge. However, using the Internet as a corpus by accessing it with one of the common general
search engines is problematic in a number of respects. 10
Most importantly, the common Internet search engines offer only few (and changing) search
algorithms. The Internet is also not linguistically annotated, and thus lacks information that
could be employed for sophisticated hypothesis testing. Internet search engines do not allow
the deduction of reliable statistical information, at least not without refined methods. (They
list page hits instead of tokens of the queried expression, and they yield different search results
at different times.) The number of queries that are allowed on one day with a given
search engine is limited. And last but not least, English (or some language that resembles
English) is used on the Internet by a large number of speakers who have limited linguistic
competence because it is not their native language. The fact that, for example, certain constructions
are used is not necessarily good evidence for their acceptability.
All in all, to simply use the web as a corpus is not advisable. The alternative is to use the web
as raw material for building a corpus. This process would involve refining the data gathered
from the Internet and is a completely different kettle of fish. However, although using the web
for building a corpus is respectable, that is not what is done when philosophers type a query
into a general search engine.
5.2 Questionnaires
The second alternative to the use of corpora, which has recently been put to sophisticated use
by experimental philosophers, is to ask informants to answer a questionnaire in a controlled
setting in order to obtain their views on how a specific concept is used. One can do so either
indirectly, by asking whether certain constructions are or are not objectionable, or directly, by
asking how the informants would characterise the meaning of a specific concept.
One thing to be said in favour of employing questionnaires is that they supplement or even
substitute for the researcher’s intuitions regarding the use of expressions under discussion.
Another is that questionnaires allow researchers to pose questions regarding very specific and
infrequent uses of expressions.
Against the practice, it must be noted that questionnaires usually are given to a very limited
number of test subjects and therefore do not necessarily solve the problem of limited active
linguistic competence. However, the major flaw of the questionnaire method is to draw the
informants’ attention to their use of the language and to thereby invite answers that do not
provide information on how informants in fact use a specific concept, but on how they believe
they use or should use the concept.
To give an example: Patricia Bruininks and Bertram Malle found that test subjects associated
more important objects with ‘hope’ than they did with ‘optimism’, ‘desire’, ‘wanting’, and
9
Cf. Bergh and Zanchetta 2008: 313.
10
Cf. Kilgarriff 2007 and Bergh and Zanchetta 2008 for the following.