searching BNC

[Jaskin]

Hello,

Could anybody tell me if it's possible to search BNC on corpus.byu.edu
for constuction such as
far/miles/comsiderably followed by any comparatives,
and how to do it.

Cheers

[Anglika]

Do you mean that you want to search a string including the slashes?

[Jaskin]

Hello,

I cant load all the help pages.
I mean in the context field like [aj*] for adjectives, [nn*] for nouns, [*vvg*] for gerund;

What stands for comparatives ?

Cheers

[Jaskin]

hello,

So, is it possible ?

Cheers,

[BobK]

Probably , but it's none of the possibilities I've tried. Somewhere on that site I once found a help page that listed all the codes, but I can't find it now.

b

[BobK]

Hello,

Could anybody tell me if it's possible to search BNC on corpus.byu.edu
for constuction such as
far/miles/comsiderably followed by any comparatives,
and how to do it.

Cheers

Those (1st) words are often followed by comparatives - "considerably [aj*]" finds these 12 before it finds "considerably different":

1 CONSIDERABLY HIGHER 93
2 CONSIDERABLY LOWER 55
3 CONSIDERABLY GREATER 50
4 CONSIDERABLY SMALLER 31
5 CONSIDERABLY LARGER 31
6 CONSIDERABLY OLDER 18
7 CONSIDERABLY LONGER 18
8 CONSIDERABLY WORSE 17
9 CONSIDERABLY BETTER 16
10 CONSIDERABLY CHEAPER 15
11 CONSIDERABLY EASIER 13
12 CONSIDERABLY YOUNGER 11
13 CONSIDERABLY DIFFERENT 10
...

It doesn't keep up that good a 'hit-rate' but I'd guess it was a good 80%.

If that doesn't meet your needs, you can do something clever with 'personal word lists' (I'm not sure if that's the exact word, but read the help). You can use such lists as input to a search, so if you weeded out hits that didn't take the form "*er", you'd get rid of "different"; unfortunately you'd get rid of "worse" too. If I were you, I'd use [aj*] and do the weeding by hand.

b

[Jaskin]

Hello,

Thank you again, BobK.

Update: I've got it ! How on earth could I miss that; it's [ajc].

Cheers

[Tdol]

I did it with far [jjr], which I got from the tags on this page: UCREL CLAWS7 Tagset
I have attached a copy of the table. BTW, can you access the BNC at the moment? I went to Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) instead as t is working, at least at my end.

[Jaskin]

Hello,

I was interested in making a comparison like this one in the file I attached.
Yes, at the moment I have access to the BNC.

Thanks a lot for the page with tags,Tdol; I'll use it for sure.
It seems the [jjr] code doesn't work in the context field.

Cheers.,