Hunston

• Materials development: e.g. Longman Dictionary

• Frequency and the lexicon

  • Basic frequency lists

  • By part of speech

  • High frequency words (e.g. (I) know ??)

• Frequency and grammar
  • Will discuss later (e.g. Biber)
• Collocation and phraseology
  • e.g. on the brink of, come to a head
  • might include information on semantic prosody (look for examples in BNC)

  • Activity: English Idioms: compare to American Corpus, TIME, and BNC

• Variation (by register)
  • nouns in ads
  • adjectives in tabloid newspapers
  • verbs in medical
  • adverbs in sermons
  • < your own searches >
• Lexical bundles
• Lexical or grammatical?
  • [nn1] for
  • [vvi] to / [vvi] that
  • [v*] [n*] to (??)
  • [v*] him/her into [vvg]
  • [aj*] for him/her to [vvi]
  • I [vv*] to, I [vv*] that
  • from [n*] to [n*]
  • this [v*] in with
• Comparing related words
  • V: smash / hit [nn*]
  • ADJ: big / large [nn*]
  • N: [vvi] the house / home
  • collocates: N, V, ADJ ??
• Authenticity

1. Multiple meanings of words

•     WordNet (Princeton / Japan)

•     Roget's Thesaurus

•     American Heritage Dictionary

2. Word distribution

• Type / tokens

• Hapax legomena (from BNC)

3. Frequency of basic words across corpora
    Compare wordlists on p98-99 with BNC data

4. Low frequency words
    Check frequency <=10 for different word classes in the BNC
    Check frequency between 200-300 in the BNC, and then compare to Brown -- enough data there??
        (e.g. spade, trait, wedge)

5. Neologisms
    Word Spy
    Oxford English Dictionary
    Compare these lists to American Corpus, TIME, BNC and Google

6. "Basic English"
    Thorndike (1944; 30,000w), West (1953; 2000w; by meaning)
    Paul Nation's word families
        (select top 15 ID,w1 from dee where L1 = w1 order by ID asc)
    LDS Basic English

7. Genre differences (p. 103-7)
    Choose a register and a part of speech -- any surprises?
    % for different parts of speech (chart on page 103)
    Most frequent for strings of POS tags (p 105)

8. Collocations

• Compare the insights of:

  • Firth (actual words in habitual company)

  • Chomsky (anti-Markovian)

  • Sinclair (open-choice principle, idiom principle)

  • Wong-Fillmore (formulaic speech)

  • Altenberg (70% recurrent)

• Issue of what constitutes a collocation (p 111):

  • "Monopoly" principle (my term); e.g. wreak havoc, stumbling block

  • Minimum frequency in a corpus

  • Syntactic or semantic?

  • Discontinuous?

  • By lemma?

• BNC multi-word expressions -- make sense?
      The silk / color issue -- more on "what constitutes a collocation?"

9. Apply Kjellmer's tests for collocations (p121) work to BNC data

10. Sinclair's "frameworks"
    from [n*] to [n*]
    this [v*] in with

11. Syntax (collocations) <> semantics
    turn of the [n*]
    Look for others in the BNC