Corpora: Corp[us|ora]

[Lou Burnard]

On Wed, 4 Apr 2001, James L. Fidelholtz wrote:

|On Wed, 4 Apr 2001, Harold Somers wrote:
|
|>Could users of this mailing list at least get it right?
|>One corpus.
|>Several corpora.
|>It's not too much to ask is it?
|
|Harold:
|	Well, it depends what language you are using.  In Spanish, the
|plural of 'corpus' would be 'corpus', especially if you're not trying to
|be snotty or hypercorrect.  Even in English, except here on the list, I
|might very well use 'corpuses'.  Maybe someone can check the BNC and see
|what they come up with.
|		Jim



Hoorah! An opportunity to point out that chapter 2 ("What is more than
one corpus?") of the excellent "BNC Handbook" by Guy Aston and Lou
Burnard, (Edinburgh Univ Press, 1998, available from all good
bookshops and quite a few bad ones) is devoted to an exercise
exploring precisely this question.

Having read on to see Harold's response to the flood of
hypercorrection which followed his original note, I wonder whether
*anyone* actually noticed the ambiguity (i.e. the fact that he might
be complaining about mis-formed singulars as well as misformed
plurals) of that posting? In which case, well, is it there really
there?

Lou

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 Lou Burnard                           http://users.ox.ac.uk/~lou
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