CORPUS LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE TEACHING

Corpus Linguistics and Language Teaching



Corpus Linguistics and Language Teaching

SECTION A

1. What is the most economical query syntax needed to carry out the following searches in COCA?

A. A search for all instances of the lemma BELIEVE

Most of the action is going to be in the panel on the left. Some of the stuff is hidden to reduce complexity, so if you want to see part-of-speech tags, just click on the text that says “POS LIST” and you'll get a drop-down menu you can choose stuff from. If you want to do collocation stuff, just click “COLLOCATES”, etc. Critical discourse analysis is not an obvious candidate for computer applications. Its methodological tradition — including an essentially holistic approach to text as well as a concern for the discourse/society interface — does not augur well for the integration of computer-aided analysis.

B. A search for synonyms of happy.

Learning a new language inevitably involves learning its vocabulary. Very often, language lessons start with vocabulary and expressions used in everyday life, such as general greetings (e.g. Good morning) and simple questioning (e.g. Where, who, what) and answering (e.g. yes and no).

C. All instances of the word fight functioning as a verb

Simple verbs such as start and begin are often put in the same group in a thesaurus, whether it is a printed thesaurus (e.g. Collins Gem Thesaurus, 1977), or an up-dated online one (e.g. http://thesaurus.com/). Even dictionaries may be saying the same thing: To begin to do something means to start doing it. (Collins COBUILD English Dictionary for Advanced Learners, 2001) In the margin beside the entry in the same dictionary, there is a note of '= start'; and next to the entry of start in the same dictionary, there is also a small note of = begin, indicating that that two are synonymous.

D. All sequences of 'at the X of the Y Z' where X = any noun, Y = any adjective and Z = any noun.

Similar to verbs, English adjectives have their synonymous groups and each word within the same group have their own characteristics. Words that look synonymous in the first instance may not be interchangeable because of the companies the words keep. In another of his study, Partington (1998) examined the collocations of sheer, complete, pure and absolute. Partington (1998) looked at the use of adjective sheer, which is used to emphasise intensifying adjectives. A closer examination of the word sheer reveals that it performs several functions, namely

E. forms of the verb get followed by an -ed or -en participle.

Sinclair (1997) defined corpus linguistics as simply the study of language through corpus-based research, but it differs from traditional linguistics in its insistence on the systematic study of authentic examples of language in use.

F. s'What a(n)' followed by any noun.

Transferral into electronic form by scanning or typing, depending on the quality of the hard-copy originals. This stage is arguably the most labourintensive. Inputting is obviously not necessary if the data already exists ...