status of linguistics research

["Bruce Nevin (bnevin)" <bnevin@cisco.com>]

Checking my spam folder, I found a 'rejected mail' message from the OASIS mail system. It had rejected the following message because it didn't have a subject heading. I can't remember if I resent it, being tipped off by something that it didn't get through.

I originally sent this on June 21. I have nothing significant to add today.
______________________________________

So far, I have confirmed my findings of last year as to what we may cite in linguistics as Authoritative Sources for our proposals for DITA.

1. Linguistics is a very broad field, and within it the subfield of discourse analysis is also extremely broad. Nevertheless, the breadth is elsewhere than our area of focus, and I have so far found absolutely nothing pertinent.
   
   To gauge this, consider the chapter contents of this definitive Handbook of Discourse Analysis:
   http://linguistlist.org/issues/12/12-2910.html
   There is another review at http://linguistlist.org/issues/13/13-512.html with less detail about the contents.
   
   One might think that corpus-based (C-B) computational analysis of content found on the web might have something of value to us, but linguists' interests are on many other matters. For example,
   consider the contents of Corpus Linguistics: Investigating Language Structure and Use
   http://linguistlist.org/issues/10/10-1923.html 
   What corpus linguists typically think of as 'document structure' is "paragraph, sentence and token segmentation"
   http://www.mila.cs.technion.ac.il/english/resources/corpora/a7corpus/index.html
   
2. Empirical analysis of different categories of business documents at our relatively high level of structure and semantics would be an original contribution to the field.
   It probably falls under what is called genre:
   http://linguistlist.org/issues/20/20-2590.html#1
   
3. Linguists might be interested in what we found. Or they might not.

I am continuing to search.