Varieties of non-obvious meaning in CL and CADS: from 'hindsight post-dictability' to sweet serendipity. Issue 3 (November 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Partington, Alan
• Is Part Of: Corpora. Volume 12:Issue 3(2017)
• Page Start: 339
• Page End: 367
• Publication Date: 2017-11
• Subjects: Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies -- corpus methodology -- intuition -- non-obvious -- serendipity; Corpora (Linguistics) -- Periodicals; 410.188
• DOI: 10.3366/cor.2017.0124
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1749-5032

Abstract

Abstract : In this paper, I want to examine the special relevance of (non)obviousness in corpus linguistics through drawing on case studies. The research discussion is divided into two parts. The first is an examination of (non)obviousness at the micro-level, that is, in lexico-grammatical analyses, whilst the second looks at the more macro-level of (non)obviousness on the plane of discourse. In the final sections, I will examine various types of non-obvious meaning one can come across in Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies (CADS), which range from: 'I knew that all along (now)' to 'that's interesting' to 'I sensed that but didn't know why' (intuitive impressions and corpus-assisted explanations) to 'I never even knew I never knew that' (serendipity or 'non-obvious non-obviousness', analogous to 'unknown unknowns').