A. Try Typing the Following Into the Search Box

Corpus Linguistics activities

USE COCA to conduct the following searches. A. Try typing the following into the search box: • absolutely correct • the old man • I got off the What types of ideas / words / phrases seem to go with these three different phrases?

1- Sear for would of and answer the following questions.

• If people use the non-grammatical would of – do they use it more when they’re speaking or writing? • In what sort of texts do people often write would of? • Is would have linked strongly with a particular type of text? • Is would of always ungrammatical? • How certain about transcription of spoken files can we be?

B. SPINSTER and BACHELOR

a. First carry out a search for bachelor. b. Have a quick look at the first 50-100 items in the concordance. c. To calculate collocations, change the DISPLAY setting from CHART to SURROUNDING. d. The Surrounding search has two other options. You can specify the size of the window around the target word, e. and you can specify a POS category. VIEW will only find collocates that have the part-of-speech you specify. f. • Set the collocation scope to be 3 words to the left and 3 words to the right g. • Set the part-of-speech to noun.ALL (to only find noun collocates)

Click on SEARCH to get a list of collocates.

You will find that the list is quite long. For now, we will not worry about statistical significance. Instead, we will ignore any collocate that occurs less than five times. a. You should see a table that looks like this:

Each row gives information for a particular collocate. First the word is given, then how many times it actually collocates with the word bachelor, then how many times the word occurs in the BNC. Make a note in the space below of the important collocates for each of the four parts of speech. Important collocates: nouns Important collocates: verbs

Important collocates: adjectives Important collocates: adverbs • Which of the four parts-of-speech are giving you interesting, potentially meaningful results? Which are not? Can you explain why? • Will this necessarily be true for all words? Or do you need to check all 4 categories each time you look at a new word? To see a concordance of all of the cases of a particular collocate and the word bachelor occurring together, click on the word in question in the first column. Looking at a concordance can be very useful in explaining why the words occur together. What sort of words collocate with bachelor? Group them into categories. For example, one category could be to do with getting a university or college degree: • bachelor

What other sorts of collocational groups can you find for bachelor.

Now try a search on the word spinster and get up a list of collocates. How many are there? Because spinster only occurs 140 times, it doesn’t have many collocates. So we can be less strict in our analysis of the collocates. Previosuly we imposed a minimum frequency of 5 for collocates – this time let’s impose a minimum frequency of 3. Explore these collocates as you did with the collocates of bachelor. Important collocates of spinster:

How do they compare with the collocates of bachelor? • Are there any discernable semantic groups? • Use a concordance to examine some of the collocates in context.

C. If Conditional

a. Check If conditional +past perfect

b. Look at the instances

c. Do all the examples fall under (If PP, would have) or are there instances that do not follow this pattern?