Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. Vol. 1. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 24)

Ramesh Krishnamurthy: Change and continuity at COBUILD (1986-1996)

'phonemes', but the general point seems to back up Cobuild's confidence in the use of corpora: "It is sometimes objected that there is no one-to-one correspondence of grapheme and phoneme, or that the graphemes show irregularities or inconsistencies of use. This is true; but there is consistency in the inconsistencies, and in sufficiently large samples the inconsistencies are leveled out. As the number of chances becomes larger and larger, the effects of each single event become less and less important and tend to cancel out; the final consequence approximates the average with great accuracy." (Joshua Whatmough, 'Language: A Modern Synthesis', Mentor Books, New American Library, New York, 1956, pp 180-1). The second quotation is taken from Arthur C. Clarke's address to the American House of Representatives Committee on Space Science and Applications on 24th July 1975, and talks about how accurately we can predict the future: "It's a cliche that we often tend to overestimate what we can do in the near future - and grossly underestimate what can be done in the more distant future. The reason for this is very obvious, though it can only be explained with a certain amount of hand-waving. The human imagination extrapolates in a straight line, but in the real world, as the Club de Rome and similar organisations are always telling us, events follow a compound-interest or exponential law. At the beginning, therefore, the straight line of the human imagination surpasses the exponential curve; but sooner or later the steeply rising curve will cross the straight line, and thereafter reality outstrips imagination. How far ahead that point is depends not only on the difficulty of the achievement, but also upon the social factors involved." (Arthur C. Clarke, To the Committee on Space Science, ch 23 of The View from Serendip, Victor Gollancz, London, 1978). 78