Distributional Structure

3.6 Data

1. Why must distributional statements be based on a corpus, not on asking speakers?
   Speakers’ habits yield regular utterances but they aren’t aware of the distributional details. So we study an actual corpus and derive regularities that would have generated these utterances, hoping they also apply to further utterances.
   • Harris, 1954, Distributional Structure (Word), §3.6, p. 161
2. What is eliciting, and why is it needed?
   Techniques that favour the appearance of utterances relevant to a question (e.g. give a speaker a noun + transitive verb and ask for many completions) without pushing them to say what they never would naturally. Rare utterances would be prohibitively laborious to find in an arbitrary corpus.
   • Harris, 1954, Distributional Structure (Word), §3.6, p. 161