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Notes at such an idea, but as in Gulliver and all his best writing, he allows the reader the pleasure
(sometimes the horror) of imagining “yes, but what if … ?”. He is perhaps the greatest virtuoso of
thought experiments, the kind beloved of philosophers.
Rationale for this Conversation between the Centuries, or a Voyage to
Glubbdubdrib
Swift himself would no doubt have smiled at his name being cited in a discussion of the pre-
history of a new approach to a human science and my contribution to the debate. Bringing a writer
from the eighteenth century face-to-face with a new way of doing linguistics in the twentieth and
twenty-first century might seem odd, but some examples from recent intellectual history might
help show that Swift’s ideas continue to have an impact on moral, political and philosophical
issues long after his death.
It seems somehow appropriate that his satire on the political wranglings of his own day, the war
between the Lilliputians and the Blefuscans should be immortalized in the world of computer
architecture. Swift’s distinctions and terms in Book I of Gulliver came to be used in informatics to
characterize the distinct approaches of little-endians and big-endians. Danny Cohen (1980), in his
pivotal paper “On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace”, uses the Lilliput-Blefuscu controversy as a
template to analyse, and seek a solution for, a major ideological confrontation within software
engineering.
Another justification for my introduction of Swift into the intellectual genealogy of corpus linguistics
can be found in present-day Swiftian scholarship. In his work God, Gulliver and Genocide, Rawson
(2001) attempts to show the relevance of ideas expressed in Book IV of Gulliver to the great moral
quandary of recent history, genocide and, most notably, the Holocaust. Swift’s Houyhnhnms’
apologia for wiping the Yahoos off the face of the earth prefigured uncannily the Nazi rationale
for their ‘final solution’. Rawson affirms that Swift betrays a harsh proleptic awareness of the later
scenarios of oppression with their complacencies and self-deception as well as outright lying … A
volatile combination of ‘meaning it, not meaning it, and not not meaning it’ enters into play,
which varies with every example, may not ever be fully definable, and flirts elusively with its own
literal content.
This analysis uncovers for us some of the layers of complexity lying in this innocuous tale of
rational horses and lascivious Yahoos and the jury of critics is still out on whether Swift favoured
one more than the other, or repudiated both. On such a multilayered reading, it is easier to
sympathise with T.S. Eliot’s (1923) affirmation, in an essay on Joyce’s Ulysses, that Swift’s vision of
the country of the Houyhnhnms was “one of the greatest triumphs that the human soul has ever
achieved”.
One final argument for bringing Swift into dialogue with modern linguistics derives from Swift
himself and that haunting section of Book III of Gulliver where the hero, after his voyage to
Glubbdubdrib, has the chance to dialogue with long-deceased thinkers such as Aristotle and
Descartes. Perhaps we might emulate Gulliver and ask to commune for twenty-four hours with
Swift himself.
Corpus Linguistics and What the Dean Might Supply
Corpus linguistics has been practised for longer than the short lifetime of the computer. In the
earlier part of the twentieth century, an urgent task for American linguists was the creation of
corpora of Amerindian languages threatened with extinction (Boas, 1911) and workers in the
empiricist/behaviourist tradition insisted that a scientific theory of language should reject all data
that are not directly observable or physically measurable (Bloomfield, 1935: 33). For these scholars,
the corpus was the sine qua non of scientific description (Leech, 1991: 73).
The temporary fall from grace of behaviourist linguistics was the result of a paradigm shift within
linguistics heralded by the publication of Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures in 1957. One of the

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