This is quite an interesting query. Would you mind forwarding or
posting a summary of the useful responses you receive?
One source that might be of interest is
@book{barhillel1964,
author = "Yehoshuah {Bar-Hillel}",
title = "Language and Information",
publisher = "Addison-Wesley",
year = "1964"
}
This is not so much about the theory of corpus linguistics, and
therefore may not be directly relevant, but it does take up some of
the philosophical issues that arose in response to
information-theoretic approaches to language a la Shannon (most of the
material in the book was originally published well prior to 1964).
Bar-Hillel spends some time on an interesting discussion of the
relationship between "information" in the sense of Shannon information
theory, and something closer to what a linguist would consider
"meaning" or semantic information. If I remember correctly (it's been
a while since I read this!), ultimately the system he proposes shares
a number of things in common with statistical information theory, but
crucially he adopts a subjectivist rather than frequentist
interpretation of probabilities.
Best,
Philip
------
Resnik
Dept of Linguistics Phone : (301) 405-6760
1401 Marie Mount Hall Fax : (301) 405-7104
University of Maryland E-mail: resnik@umiacs.umd.edu
College Park, MD 20742