Corpora and Concordances,
2.30 p.m. – 5.00 p.m., Friday
Facilitators – Wayne Rimmer, Olga Rotko

Hi all,

I’m typing this post sitting in the conference hall listening to Wayne, the Cambridge grammar-guru, enumerating curious statistics facts. And I’m just overwhelmed with the desire to share them with you. Did you ever know that the word Friday occurs noticeably more frequently in actual speech than other days of the week? In fact, nearly twice more often than Wednesday judging from the bar graph shown on the screen. No wonder though, everyone is looking forward to it whenever it’s not Friday! It just could not have failed to make its way into the language.

Still pronounce “often” with a perceptible “t”? Then you have another think coming, a growing majority of Britons would omit it altogether.
Your language teacher taught you to pronounce February with an “r” sound? You don’t have to. Many (in fact most Brits save the most picky ones) Britons will substitute ‘j” for it never batting an eye.
“Putin” occurs three times more frequently in the Russian media than “Medvedev”. Do you still have any doubts about who is in charge here J?

As is known, the English language is very dense in verbs, far more dense than Russian, actually. Yet, few people know that nouns still several times outnumber verbs (“Every tenth word is a verb, every fourth word is a noun”). which brings us a ratio of about 2 to 1.

Where do I get these facts? From a corpus, of course!

In common parlance a corpus is something like a huge collection of texts (of all types possible) and excerpts of spoken language parsed through some sophisticated as hell machine so that you can scour all those texts for whatever necessary information you fancy. The words are tagged grammatically, lexically and in whatever other possible way, to make it possible for the user to search the enormously large textual array for many a different thing. This way you can find how many times more frequently Simple tenses occur in the English language than Perfect ones, or how the use of modal verbs varies across dialects or over time.

What am I getting at? Aside from the funny statistics facts corpora carry an immeasurable practical value. Even if you have a pretty good feel of the language, you still cannot rely on it fully. You might want to back up your guess by looking up the word, phrase or whatever, in a reputable dictionary, or a corpus. Because the truth is that sometimes reasoning does not work with language.

In fact, the use of corpora and concordances is a thing to make your language skills leap forwards like you never believe. It was said somewhere that to make a word your active vocabulary you need to come across it in, like, 20 different contexts. Do you imagine doing that without a corpus? Even if you do, there is still the guesswork factor. When you go through a corpus viewing the results line by line and subconsciously evaluating them against many criteria, you get something out of it that makes your command of the language closer to that of a native speaker. Therefore, using a corpus exercises your brain far more intensely than getting a ready-made answer from a dictionary.

Even if you are long past learning the very words and you are focused on particularly advanced things like lexical collocation and frequency of occurrence, corpus is exactly the thing you need since when you arrive at a certain advanced level and your imagination with the language reaches far beyond what a typical (yet, high quality) dictionary has to offer.

If you happen to belong into one of the said categories, then you must have a try with it, if you have not so far. Below is a summary of this session and links to corpora and concordances (a variation of corpora).

1. Frequency statistics
2. Rules and usage
3. Language change
4. Typical Russian errors
5. Practical concordancing
6. Links, bibliography

Bibliography

• Longman Grammar of spoken and written English
• From corpus to classroom
• Cambridge grammar of English. Carter and McCarthy (2006)

(I decided to mention the names not to additionally market them, but because these books are claimed to be an extremely effective tool you can employ to bring the use of corpora into the classroom)

• www.bnc.com
• www.edict.com.hk/concordance

Keep in touch.

P.S. Attached to this post are questionnaires Olga and Wayne gave out to put to a test the participants' feel of the language. Take a look and make sure you know the answers.