"work construction" 'do construction work'

[Mark Davies]

I've collected almost 70 examples from COCA for the 'work lumberman' construction, with the results at:

http://www.americancorpus.org/results/work_occupations.htm

To generate this list, just enter the following query at the website (just copy and paste):

   worked.[v*] [davies:occupations_1]

To get more results (about 200 or so, but a bit more garbage as well), try:

   [work].[v*] [davies:occupations_1]

BTW, in looking at these, I would agree that most of these do relate to "undesirable / hard" jobs. I think a possible diachronic trajectory might be:

work + stone / leather / wood (hard manual labor)
-->
work + harbors / construction/ lumbermen / prostitution, suicide, gangs (police beat)


Mark D.

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Mark Davies
Professor of (Corpus) Linguistics
Brigham Young University
(phone) 801-422-9168 / (fax) 801-422-0906
Web: davies-linguistics.byu.edu

** Corpus design and use // Linguistic databases **
** Historical linguistics // Language variation **
** English, Spanish, and Portuguese **
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org