What they areHow they are used

How our Student Grammar uses themExamples of lexical concordancing

A corpus is“a large, systematic collection of texts stored on

computer” (SGSWE, 3)People creating dictionaries, grammars, and other

text materials use them forReal, authentic examples of usage in different

contextsVariation, preferences, and frequency of use in

different genresCoverage of usage across registers and dialects,

across learners and languages: SGSWE uses conversation, fiction, news and academic registers

RegistersOur grammar text, SGSWE, is keyed to registers,

which are situation-cued varieties of language. A register is characterized by

Mode - whether the language is spoken or writtenInteractiveness, produced in real time – real or

simulated Shared situation – co-producedMain purpose - inform, explain, evaluate, personal

communication, argument, pleasure (reading)Audience – individual, group, specialist, wide-

public

Our grammar text is corpus-basedIt is based on usage, derived from a very large

collection of words (currently a little over 40 million), occurring in specific registers

This particular grammar focuses on words, phrases and clauses.

It is descriptive rather than prescriptive or proscriptive. That is, the grammar does not present norms of social or political correctness. It does, however, present reasons for certain choices and it identifies issues of disputed usage, which is pedagogically usefrul

Website with examples of corpora

http://bowland-files.lancs.ac.uk/monkey/ihe/linguistics/corpus4/4fra1.htm

Teachers can use corpora to collect and access real dataStvan 2005 suggests that language

teachers•create small-scale corpora•sample relevant specialized texts •“craft hands-on inferential vocabulary tasks”

to increase interest and retain word meanings

Examples of small corpora might includeMenus and Cookbooksindividual Novels SpeechesAppliance manuals Business letters

ConferencesEach of these could become a small corpus introducing

specialized vocabulary.New learners ‘retained vocabulary knowledge at

higher rates’ if they looked at meanings across multiple contexts – using concordancing (Cobb 2005).

80% of words in most English texts belong to the 2000 most frequent word families, according to Paul Nation. Teachers can see how the text uses these words first and then use lexical concordance tools to identify harder ones – like LexTutor (we’ll work with these)

Concordance? two examplesword (or phrase) in context, arranged in appropriate order

From the BNC: ‘ferocious’ Back in Chania, the Calypso bar is filling with elderly Cretan men

who click a lot: worry-beads clatter through their fiddling fingers, and they smack down chips on gameboards with ferocious violence.

The Repton boy's horror at Churchill's anti- olshevist campaign had turned into a more adult and less ferocious criticism.

Consequently he was in a ferocious temper when he got into his room and saw a mound of mail on his desk, half of which was addressed to Steinmark.

A couple got off the train, were met by the police and put up a ferocious but unsuccessful fight:

suspicionof a bank robbery the previous day, in Thunder Bay. first impressions, keeping ferocious dogs is not exactly novel in

South Africa. Similarities are clear: the ferocious teeth of a predatory dinosaur

are a sure indication of hunting habits, with hardly a glance at the fangs of living mammalian carnivores.

 Although we may first think of ferocious as applying only to

animals (and the acts committed by their teeth), we see an extension of that meaning to the teeth, to criticism, to temper, and to small violent actions in a game.

Example: business lettersNelson (2006) examined a corpus of business letters

to identify patterns of collocates (words that co-locate)

He shows how positive and negative impressions are created and how thematic images and metaphors are invoked, by using collocates in a particular genre. Word choice is patterned: student writers need to investigate patterns of words as well as the words themselves.

keyword collocates withcause: accident, cancer, commotion,

crisis, delayprovide: care, food, jobs, relief, supportemployee benefits, restaurants, holiday, bonus

Categories:

Checking the BNC for ‘provide’Notice that in a large corpus incorporating a number of genres, not just business letters, provide collocates withservices and information for salience (the degree to which the words are mutual in their ‘call for each other.’ Think of fashion: yellow striped tie is salient with blue shirt – person with blue shirt more likely to pick yellow tie, person with yellow tie more likely to pick blue shirt)

In terms of frequency, provide collocates with a (which is typically followed by a noun or nominal phrase)to (like TELL, provide can be ditransitive, which means a person provides something to somebody. Check concordance to see what happens if inanimate or organization provides

The irony of ditransitivity in Frost’s “Provide, provide”

The witch that came (the withered hag)To wash the steps with pail and rag,Was once the beauty Abishag,

The picture pride of Hollywood.Too many fall from great and goodFor you to doubt the likelihood.

Die early and avoid the fate.Or if predestined to die late,Make up your mind to die in state.

Make the whole stock exchange your own!If need be occupy a throne,Where nobody can call you crone.

Some have relied on what they knew,Others on being simply true.What worked for them might work for you.

No memory of having starredAtones for later disregardOr keeps the end from being hard.

Better to go down dignifiedWith boughten friendship at your sideThan none at all. Provide, provide!