100 million word British National Corpus.

[Jing-Jo]

Interesting thoughts...keep it going...TDOL, when you say you get your students to do (?) concordance checks on Google, how is it done? I am very new to this whole concordance data business but I like what I see...very interesting...

Cheers

Originally Posted by tdol

It has many limitations, but it is a very good way to get people started, and is good for frequency, geography, etc. If people look carefully at the results, they might be able to amalyse register themselves- if it's all fromm business texts, say, then that gives clues. It doesn't offer the clever searches, though.

www.onelook.com is another handy tool with wildcards for basic things like prefixes and suffixes.

Which limitations have you identified and is there a better free source?

<If people look carefully at the results, they might be able to amalyse register themselves- >

Even NNES?

<It doesn't offer the clever searches, though. >

For example?

<www.onelook.com is another handy tool with wildcards for basic things like prefixes and suffixes. [/>

Does onelook provide information on text type or register?

[Red5]

Google has many search tools which are not widely known about. For examples, see this page and this page.

[Tdol]

Originally Posted by Jing-Jo

Interesting thoughts...keep it going...TDOL, when you say you get your students to do (?) concordance checks on Google, how is it done? I am very new to this whole concordance data business but I like what I see...very interesting...

Cheers

Firstly, it's amazing how many people don't know how to use the " " in a search for a complete phrase. Armed with this, a student can do a simple comparison. Let's say we want to compare complete and utter with the word disgrace:

We do a search for "complete disgrace", using the inverted commas: 7,220, then we do "utter disgrace": 13,400. It is clear that both are correct, but 'utter' is more common. Now, let's try it with something else:

"complete change" 237,000
"utter change" 992
Here, the figures clearly show that 'complete'is the natural collocation.

British vs American usage

Compare http://www.google.com and http://www.google.co.uk, you can add Australian, http://www.google.com.au, etc. However, the .com doesn't only mean the USA- we're classified as US because we use a .com address, but it can give help.

Prepositional usage:

"Depend on" 18,200,000
"Depend of" (European student favourite mistake) 76,300
Google can help you with this.

This kind of use of Google as a language tool is easy and useful, but it has limitations. I think it's a good start.

Originally Posted by tdol

Firstly, it's amazing how many people don't know how to use the " " in a search for a complete phrase. Armed with this, a student can do a simple comparison. Let's say we want to compare complete and utter with the word disgrace:

We do a search for "complete disgrace", using the inverted commas: 7,220, then we do "utter disgrace": 13,400. It is clear that both are correct, but 'utter' is more common. Now, let's try it with something else:

"complete change" 237,000
"utter change" 992
Here, the figures clearly show that 'complete'is the natural collocation.

British vs American usage

Compare http://www.google.com and http://www.google.co.uk, you can add Australian, http://www.google.com.au, etc. However, the .com doesn't only mean the USA- we're classified as US because we use a .com address, but it can give help.

Prepositional usage:

"Depend on" 18,200,000
"Depend of" (European student favourite mistake) 76,300
Google can help you with this.

This kind of use of Google as a language tool is easy and useful, but it has limitations. I think it's a good start.

<This kind of use of Google as a language tool is easy and useful, but it has limitations. I think it's a good start.>

Yes, I agree, a good start. For more advanced students though, I think a true concordancer is a necessary tool. Also, Google searches both native and nonnative examples of English, so cannot always be relied on to provide correct usage.
-----------------

I can't find any examples of "complete disgrace" in the BNC.

<We do a search for "complete disgrace", using the inverted commas: 7,220, then we do "utter disgrace": 13,400. It is clear that both are correct, but 'utter' is more common. >

But ones searches are only as good as the words one can think of as collocates.

E.G.

The BNC gives "absolute" as the main adjective collocate for the noun "disgrace" (adj + noun collocation). On BNC, you get to that by using the tag [aj*] followed by a space and then the noun. How do I do that on Google?

Using that information I can then go to Google to see if it tallies.

37,900 - "absolute disgrace".
7,280 - "complete disgrace".
13,500 - "utter disgrace"

We see that the strongest collcation is actually "absolute disgrace" in both Google and the BNC. That isn't so surprising as "absolute" is a more forceful adjective than "complete", and I suppose "utter", and it collocates well with an equally forceful noun such as "disgrace".

Taking all that back to the BNC, I can now check if there are differences between which collocation pair appears in a certain register, regarding frequency.

Spoken register:

ABSOLUTE DISGRACE 9
UTTER DISGRACE 2
COMPLETE DISGRACE 0

Fiction register:

UTTER DISGRACE 1
ABSOLUTE DISGRACE 1
COMPLETE DISGRACE 0

News Register:

ABSOLUTE DISGRACE 5
UTTER DISGRACE 5
COMPLETE DISGRACE 0

So it appears that UTTER DISGRACE is less popular in spoken English, but equally popular in fiction and the news.

Interesting, innit? Interesting also that "absolute" (adj) is far more common that "utter" (adj) in the BNC.

N.B. To me, "complete disgrace" doesn't feel like BE. It may be, but I don't use it.

But then again, from a search on Google.co.uk (pages from the UK only), I get this:

7,670 for "absolute disgrace".
1,340 for "complete disgrace"
554 for "utter disgrace".

Still "absolute disgrace" comes out on top, which tells me that my little [aj*] DISGRACE helped me find not only the more common of two collocations, but also the most common.

So you can see why I have a preference for the BNC.

Originally Posted by Red5

Google has many search tools which are not widely known about. For examples, see this page and this page.

Many thanks.

[Red5]

Originally Posted by Red5

re: this site

[Tdol]

Originally Posted by M56

So you can see why I have a preference for the BNC.

The BNC obviously has tools that target language, which give it a clear edge over Google; I am only proposing Googling as a way of getting people into the basic idea. However, one thing in Google's favour is that it has the widest and most inclusive database of any tool.

Originally Posted by tdol

The BNC obviously has tools that target language, which give it a clear edge over Google; I am only proposing Googling as a way of getting people into the basic idea. However, one thing in Google's favour is that it has the widest and most inclusive database of any tool.

<However, one thing in Google's favour is that it has the widest and most inclusive database of any tool. >

With hundreds of thousands of examples of nonnative use.