OVERVIEW
 

• What gives a corpus value for researchers?

• Give a few examples of the relationship between frequency and register (text type)

• Give a few examples of corpus insights into phraseology and collocation

• What are some general uses of corpora?  Which interest you the most?

• What are some different types of corpora? Which would be the most useful for you?

• Define the following: type, token, hapax, lemma, word-form, tag, parse, annotation

• Give some examples where corpora provide (even native speakers) with insights that otherwise might not be available.

• [ACTIVITY] Hunston claims that native speaker intuition usually isn’t very good at guessing frequency and/or collocation.  Try answering the following questions in your head, and only after this compare your intuitions from actual data from the 100 million word British National Corpus (using this site):

o   What is the relative frequency of the following verbs: look, live, like, get, take (input each one separately -- e.g. look -- and then just look at the the listings for verbs; e.g. [VVI] = use as infinitive)

o   What is the relative frequency of the following adjectives: important, big, other, only, hard

o   What adjectives occur most frequently with painfully and with completely? (e.g. painfully [aj0])

o   What verbs occur most frequently with slowly and with hardly? (e.g. [vvd] slowly) (note: [vvd] = -ED form of a lexical (non-AUX) verb)

o   What verbs occur most frequently in the phrase: hard to V (hard to [vvi]) (note: [vvi] = infinitival form of a lexical verb)

• What considerations do we need to keep in mind in interpreting corpus data?

• (p213) What does Hunston mean when she says that corpora can be both authoritarian and empowering?

• What does Hunston mean when she says that corpora have made language analysis more simple, as well as more complex?