[ontolog-forum] A Question About Conversations Taking Place in Written F

[Thomas Johnston <tmj44p@xxxxxxx>]

2015-10-12 – A Question on the Availability of Written Language as Semantic Evidence

This seems to be a day for questions, for me.

Linguists have often emphasized the primacy of the spoken language over the written language, of utterances over "inscriptions" as I call them. This primacy is a primacy in the order of original production, as far as ordinary conversational conversation is concerned. And this is the kind of linguistic evidence linguists seem most concerned with. Written books are not records of spoken language, nor are emails for that matter; but linguists still seem to emphasize utterances over inscriptions. Perhaps it is an unspoken assumption that it is in conversation that we get ahold of "real" linguistic behavior. Whether or not the primacy of spoken language is justified as a source of linguistic evidence, spoken language is, beyond a doubt, very important. I'm just saying that I think that written language (not transcriptions of spoken language) is important, too, and seems to me to be a neglected source of linguistic evidence.

Nonetheless, I am interested in conversations, and it occurs to me that the Internet contains extensive records of conversational exchanges, in email threads, in tweets, and in social media in general. I'd like to get my hands on written records of conversations that were conversations originally inscribed, not uttered. More precisely, I'd like to get my hands on some of that evidence that has been assembled and organized to make it easier to use than the raw data of Facebook pages, tweets, text messages, and the like.

Does anyone know of any such organized compilations of conversations that, I emphasize, were conducted, in the original, in written form?

Thanks,

Tom

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